
Copyright )1°. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Italian 
F^ignette s 

by 
Mary W. Arms 




NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

MCMIX 



Copyright IQOg by 
Mitchell Kennerley 






24 88 5 6 



•v. 



To 

K. W. A. and J. T. A, 

and the 
Memory of Days in Italy, 



ITALIAN VIGNETTES 

PAGE 

In Faery Lands 9 

To Marigliano 29 

Into the Golden Age 51 

Impressions in Rome 73 

The Campo Dei Fiori 99 

An Audience at the Vatican 115 

Holy Week and Easter in Rome 127 

Old Cloisters 147 

Tivoli 163 

Stones of Florence 179 

A Venetian Monastery 205 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

View from the Cappucchini Convent 18 

Sicilian Peasant's Cart 36 

Villa Torricella at Capri 62 

Ruins of the Forum 78 

Gallery of Sculpture in the Vatican 80 

Statue of Garibaldi on the Janiculum 92 

Pope Pius X with his Court 122 

Cloisters of Scm Paolo fuori le Mura 148 

Cloisters of St. John Later an 154 

Remains of Claudian's Aqueduct 164 

The Bargello, Florence 180 

Hall of Arms in the Bargello 182 

Staircase in the Bargello 184 

Fra Angelico's Annunciation 198 

Savonarola's Cell 200 

Armenian Convent, San Lazzaro 208 



IN FAERY LAISTDS 



In Faery Lands 

r I iHE little toy engine puflFs and 
'*' wheezes, and gives its shrill baby 
whistle; the guard toots his little tin 
horn, and cries "partenza"; there is a 
last shuffing of belated passengers, a 
slamming to of doors, and you are off 
— out of the dimness of the Naples Sta- 
tion into the sunhght of the open coun- 
try, out from 

" The weariness, the fever, and the fret 
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan '* 

into the faery land of a poet's dream. 

[9] 



Italian Vignettes 

With careful consideration and fre- 
quent pauses, the train that is acting as 
your magic carpet bears you on through 
ever-unfolding loveliness of color and 
form. On one side, the turquoise Bay, 
dimpling under the light kiss of the 
morning breeze ; on the other, the grow- 
ing majesty of Vesuvius, from whose 
crest faint curls of smoke, like incense, 
float upwards and are lost in the lumi- 
nous air. Now you pass a quaint vil- 
lage, its white houses weather-stained 
into harmony with the surrounding 
blues and greens and golds, yellow 
sticks of macaroni drying on the roofs 
or hung fringe-like between sticks in 
the patch of ground no smallest hut is 

[ 10 ] 



In Faery Lands 

without. Now orange- groves, like 
other and vaster Gardens of the Hes- 
perides, thrust their gold-laden 
branches almost within reach of your 
hand. 

After a while the train strikes inland. 
The Bay and its rocky crescent of shore 
are blotted out, and the mountains that 
have been serving as a shadowy back- 
ground begin to reach green-veiled 
arms about you. Closer and closer 
they come; and the air seems to grow 
purer, breathing down from their 
heights; and the laughter of falling 
water answers the tooting of the 
guard's tin horn as you pause at station 
after station. Finally " La Cava " is 

[11] 



Italian Vignettes 

called — a hamlet in nowise differing, it 
would seem, from all the others you 
have watched go by, yet forever to be 
distinguished in your memory. For is 
it not the spot where you and the toy 
engine part company; the spot where, 
perhaps, you lunch, drinking liquid 
sunshine that is called Lagrime 
Cristi and eating certain grapes 
that have been brought to a perfection 
of lusciousness by boihng in wine and 
spices; above all, the spot whence you 
enter — ^borne this time by carriage — 
into the latter and most wonderful part 
of the day's dream? Over a road that 
winds in serpent coils up and down the 
hills, lies your new route; through vivid 

[12] 



In Faery Lands 

villages and under frowning, ruin- 
crowned bluffs ; across deep gorges that 
seem but perilously spanned by their 
airy bridges; past groves of oranges 
and lemons glowing in the sunlight 
under the emerald of their leaves; 
through a country that grows more 
wildly beautiful at every turn till your 
eyes and your mind are alike almost 
overstrained with the grandeur, the 
color, the harmony, the poetic and 
dreamlike enchantment of it all. 

At Vietri the road comes out on the 
Gulf of Salerno, and thenceforward 
follows closely the windings of the 
coast, so the familiar sea-blue is once 
more an element in the color scheme, 

[13] 



Italian Vignettes 

deepening into strange greens and pur- 
ples in the shadow of the cliffs. There 
is added, too, the brilliant picturesque- 
ness of the marine, the tiny beaches 
which here and there find place in a 
cleft of the rocks, where the wavelets 
break in white foam and the gay stripes 
of the fishermen's boats make a carni- 
ival of color on the brown sand. As 
the afternoon declines you may see the 
fishermen themselves returning from 
their labors, and the marine alive with 
villagers — the men swarming about the 
boats, the women in their bright dresses 
laughing and chattering as they wait to 
help carry the fish up to the houses. 
It makes a series of charming pictures, 

[14] 



In Faery Lands 

framed by the enclosing bluffs that are 
getting an added touch of sternness 
now the light is fading. This stern- 
ness is perhaps the most surprising note 
in the landscape, especially if you are 
of those in whose imaginings Southern 
Italy is pictured all smiles and placid- 
ity. These giant peaks, these deep and 
narrow valleys, these glimpses of dis- 
tant snow-mountains, might almost de- 
lude you into believing yourself in 
Switzerland. But no. The lemon or- 
chards, laid out terrace on terrace 
wherever an indentation makes a shel- 
tered spot on the cliifside, their pale 
yellow fruit covered from the night 
cold by ingenious thatch roofings; the 

[15] 



Italian Vignettes 

ruined watch-towers and monasteries of 
a bygone age; the villages clinging to 
every available spur, with their half 
ruinous houses — white and salmon-pink 
and baby-blue — ^built up one against 
the other and seeming a part, almost, of 
their rocky hold; the wayside shrines 
before which kneel the little brown cow- 
herds, or the loathsome beggars, or the 
wrinkled old women bowed beneath the 
load of their faggots; the very cliffs 
themselves, honey-combed with grot- 
toes and twisted into a thousand 
strange, fantastic forms as of towered 
castle or fortress — all these breathe the 
enchantment that is of Italy alone. 
And it is part of this enchantment 
[16] 



In Faery Lands 

also that, when the sunset has strewn 
the still waters with gold, with rose- 
leaves and violets, and the snow-moun- 
tains have blushed and glowed and then 
paled into dim grayness, you should 
come — driving among and beyond the 
twinkling Hghts of Amalfi — to a flight 
of stone steps chmbing a dusky height, 
and halting there, be told that your 
lodging for the night lies above, in the 
ancient Convent of the Cappuccini. 
A Convent! — no other resting-place 
would have made fitting conclusion to 
the day's dream. What matter that 
the Convent is now a hotel, that blue- 
bloused porters swarm around your 
luggage instead of lay-brothers, and 

[IT] 



Italian Vignettes 

that instead of the prior's paw vohis- 
cum you are welcomed at the entrance 
by the broken English of the Uttle 
directrice? These are superficial 
things. The reality lies in the sense of 
profound calm, of out-of-the-world- 
ness, which comes over you as you 
mount the last step and find yourself 
between a flower-scented terrace that 
stretches into the shadows on the one 
hand, and glimmering views of a low, 
rambling building, clinging to a shelf 
of rock on the other. And when you 
have entered the building, and threaded 
the long corridors, and supped in the 
vaulted dining-room, and seen the tiny 
chapel; above all, when you enter the 

[18] 



In Faery Lands 

little white-washed cell allotted you as 
a sleeping room, you will be unimagina- 
tive indeed, if you fail to see wavering 
shadows of cowl and gown and hear the 
soft patter of sandalled feet, as the 
ghosts of the Capuchin fathers come to 
give their benediction to the sojourner 
in the fair eyrie they created so long 
ago to be the home of their prayers and 
aspirations. 

Nor does the next morning's clear 
light chase away the monastic illusion 
— especially if you have chanced to ar- 
rive on a Saturday night. Then your 
waking is made musical with the sound 
of many church-bells, and on the w^hite 
road that winds along by the foot of 

[19] 



Italian Vignettes 

the steps you may see passing figures 
of priests and peasants on their way to 
Mass. A bright Sunday peacefuhiess 
lies over all the scene, as you look out 
upon it from the wonderful terrace that 
you only half divined in the darkness 
of your arrival, and that you now find 
to be a broad walk, roofed with over- 
lacing grape-vines, built along a ledge 
of rock, with the sheer cHfF going down 
from it on one side and the gold-laden 
branches of orange trees overhanging 
it on the other, while against the soft 
brownish-gray of its stone colurans 
vines and blossoming plants make 
bright splotches of color. Below you 
is the town — such a quiet-seeming little 

[20] 



In Faery hands 

town that you find it hard to realize its 
stirring memories of the day when it 
contended with Pisa and Genoa for the 
empire of the seas, when its merchants 
gave laws to conmierce, and its scien- 
tists gave the compass to the use of 
sailors of all time. Into the golden dis- 
tance that holds Paestum stretch the 
blue waters of the Salernian Gulf; and 
all around you are the mountains, the 
further ones snow-touched, the nearer 
giant peaks softened with patches of 
green. 

It would hardly seem possible to be 
more utterly taken out of the busy 
world of to-day, but there is a still 
higher solitude to which you may pen- 

[21] 



Italian Vignettes 

etrate if you will. The little village of 
Ravello, "molto antico e molto inter- 
ressante "* as your coachman will prob- 
ably tell you, is nested yet nearer the 
clouds. A winding road leads to it, 
ascending inland between slopes 
starred with delicate sweet-alyssum, 
fragile cyclamen, exquisite lavender 
crocus, and gay white daisies ; with con- 
stant glimpses of terraced lemon-or- 
chards sheltered in some deep gorge, 
and the ruins of old watch-towers and 
monasteries detaching themselves 
darkly against the luminous blue of 
sky. The village itself consists of a 
handful of picturesque houses clustered 

* "Very old and very interesting." 
[ 22 ] 



In Faery Lands 

about one of those worn old stone foun- 
tains which bear such close kinship to 
the wells pictured in the illustrated 
Bibles of one's childhood. It boasts a 
Cathedral, on whose interior, however, 
the vandal hand of "modern improve- 
ment " has been laid to such an extent 
that its chief interest — aside from the 
quaint and beautiful 13th Century pul- 
pit and ambo — is to be found in the 
genre scenes you may often surprise 
within its walls. Perhaps you will 
stumble upon a Sunday- School class in 
full operation, in which case your atten- 
tion will be likely to wander from the 
sacristan's explanation of sacred relics 
to the little village tots who sit so 

[23] 



Italian Vignettes 

primly on the stiiF-back chairs, their 
round dark eyes solemnly fixed on the 
black-robed priest facing them, their 
shrill voices sounding in chorus in an- 
swer to his deeper-toned questions. 

But the pride of Ravello lies not so 
much in its Cathedral as in the dwelling 
of its one-time lords — ^the Palazzo Ru- 
f olo. It is a very irregular and wholly 
enchanting comminghng of old and 
new, of war and peace and the poetry 
of nature, with its strong mediaeval 
tower, its delicate and graceful Moorish 
cloisters — half veiled by trailing vines 
— and its fragrant garden where Eng- 
lish daisies grow placidly in the stately 
shadow of the palms. The Signora 

[24] 



In Faery Lands 

Padrona lives here quite alone, the gar- 
dener will tell you — "an old lady, si, 
si; seventy-eight years old." 

'* And has she no children, no rela- 
tives?" you ask. 

" No, no — alone, always quite alone." 
An enviable fate, perhaps, to live 
your last years out thus restfuUy, re- 
mote from all the world save the narrow 
Uttle world of the village; to forget all 
fever and fret in the antique quiet that 
clings about old walls ; to still your pas- 
sions into harmony with the eternal ma- 
jesty and breadth of the grave moun- 
tains and the bright waters that play 
about their feet. At any rate, you carry 
even from your transient vision of high 

[25] 



Italian Vignettes 

Ravello the benediction of these things. 
And when the time comes for you to de- 
part from Amalfi's white monastery 
also, you take up your task, down here 
in the active world, with a better cour- 
age because you know that even in the 
worst heat of the day you can, by grace 
of the dear gift of memory, cross the 
seas once more, and hear again the 
nightingale singing by those 

" Magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 



[26] 



II 



TO MARIGLIANO 



To Maeigliano 

T T was a Sunday morning in Febru- 
^ ary, one of those exquisite morn- 
ings with which Italy has a habit of up- 
setting the season reckoning of the 
traveller who has left winter raging be- 
hind him, and steps suddenly into ra- 
diant spring. The Bay of Naples lay 
like a vast turquoise pavement under 
the turquoise vault of the heavens, with 
Capri rising altar-like in its midst; 
from Vesuvius soft puffs of white 
smoke mounted lazily into the luminous 
air; and a wandering minstrel down 
some side street sang Addio, mia hella 



Italian Vignettes 

Napoli with the pathetic conviction of 
one approaching exile. 

** Del ciel I'azzurro fulgido. 
La placida marina^ 
Qual core non inebria, 
Non be a di volutta ! " 

Suddenly I remembered Sebastiano 
and the promise I had made before I 
sailed over to this " peaceful shore " 
which had been his birthplace and by 
which his parents still lived. A vivid 
picture of the eagerness that Ut up his 
eyes and his whole round face when he 
learned that I was bound for Naples, 
flashed across my mind. 

" The Signorina goes to Naples? 
Then will the Signorina not see my 

[30] 



To Marigliano 

father and mother and salute them for 
me? — and my two sisters also, and the 
little brother, yes ? " 

The Signorina had signified her per- 
fect willingness to salute his entire 
family, including aunts and cousins, 
collectively and individually, if such 
were his desire. Only, did they really 
live in Naples itself? Certainly they 
did — or so near that it was the same 
thing. And would the Signorina be 
the bearer of a letter and a " beautiful- 
ness" to Sebastiano's mother? The 
Signorina was again acquiescent, only 
stipulating that the " beautifulness " 
should be of a size compatible with 
steamer luggage. I may add that 

[•31] 



Italian Vignettes 

when finally purchased and brought 
out for inspection, this article proved to 
be a pea-green table-cover embroidered 
with violently pink roses. It was 
very cheerful, if at first sight somewhat 
startling, and it was committed to my 
charge with elaborate and earnest in- 
^ structions as to its safe delivery. In 
the course of these instructions it had 
come out that Sebastiano's paternal 
home was in a village called Marigli- 
ano. 

"But you said Naples, Sebastiano," 
I had objected. 

" Eh, Signorina, it's all the same, it's 
so near — and then the road, Signorina, 
such a road ! Like the floor of a palace 

[32] 



To Marigliano 

for smoothness and cleanness. And 
when you come to Marighano, you will 
ask for the house of Sebastiano Espo- 
sito, dealer in fine wines — and when 
you are at the door, there will come out 
a woman, si, Signorina. But you will 
not say to her all at once, * I come from 
Sebastiano,' no, no. You will say: 
'My good woman, have you by any 
chance sons in America? ' And she 
vnW burst into tears, crying, * Ah, my 
Sebastiano ! ' — and so you will know it 
is my mother, Signorina. And you 
will say : * Be comforted, then. I my- 
self, with these my own eyes, have seen 
your son, and he is fat, and well, and 
beautiful.' " 

[33] 



Italian Vignettes 

The memory of this conversation it 
was which came to me, as I listened to 
the street musician singing the " Fare- 
well to Naples," and I promptly an- 
nounced that Sebastiano's commission 
must be delayed no longer in fuljSU- 
ment. As a first step we would inquire 
how far it really was to Marigliano. 
We did — and learned, somewhat to our 
dismay, that it was a good thirteen 
miles or more. 

And how could one get there? — by 
tram, by the steam-cars? 

Eh, no; what should trams and 
steam-cars be doing in that direction? 
No forestieri ever went to Marigliano. 

One must take a carriage then? 
[34] 



To Marigliano 

Assuredly, if one desired to go. But 
there was indeed nothing to be seen 
there ; our excellent selves might be cer- 
tified that forestieri never thought of 
going • 

" So much the better," said we, and 
promptly started in search of a car- 
riage. 

An hour later we were out of Naples 
and well on our way along the road that 
Sebastiano had likened to the floor of a 
palace. It wound inland, giving one 
— in compensation for the blue Bay left 
behind — a view of broad fields stretch- 
ing warmly away on either hand, some 
flaunting garlands of grape-vines, some 
laid out in trim vegetable patches ; while 

[35] 



Italian Vignettes 

in the distance to the right, Vesuvius 
still kept watch. Occasionally a tiny- 
house, time-worn and weather-stained 
into colorful picturesqueness, detached 
itself against the green background. 
Once we passed what had evidently 
been a gateway of some pretension. It 
was of white stucco, mellowed into har- 
mony with its surroimdings, and its 
arch framed a picture worthy of a 
Theocritan idyll. A two-wheeled cart, 
its shafts resting on the ground, occu- 
pied the center, and in the cart stood a 
youth who might have just stepped out 
from among the statues in the Naples 
Museima. The slender figure with its 
proud carelessness of bearing was that 

[36] 



To Marigliano 

of the young Bacchus; so too were the 
bare, bronzed legs, the wealth of dark 
curls piled above the low brow, and 
most of all the air as of one joyously 
untouched by the cares and sadness of 
the world. Eternal magic of Italy 1 
— in whose hght the very peasants ap- 
pear as gods, and the homeliest scene 
gives out a thousand graces of poetic 
suggestion. 

The further we progressed on oiu* 
way, the more evident did it become 
that foreigners on the Marigliano road 
were indeed a novelty. The peasants 
who passed us, out holiday jaunting in 
their gaily painted two-wheeled carts, 
stared after us with frankest astonish- 

[•37] 



Italian Vignettes 

ment; a gleam of curiosity lightened 
the wrinkled, toil-deadened faces of the 
old women mounted on their tiny gray 
donkeys ; and even the appearance of a 
bridal party in full regalia could not 
wholly take from us the public atten- 
tion, though it entirely engrossed our 
own. The newly married couple were 
seated side by side in an open carriage, 
that none of their glory should be hid- 
den from the gaze of the world. The 
bride, a full-blown contadina beauty 
attired all in white, wore a massive gilt 
crown above her veil, and was hung as 
thickly with chains and baubles as 
though she were a votive image. Any- 
thing more utterly and beatifically self- 

[38] 



To Marigliano 

complacent than her expression as she 
leaned back, quite overshadowing the 
insignificant male creature beside her, 
I have never in my life seen. It was 
her hour of triumph, this slow progress 
before the admiring or envious groups 
of her fellow-villagers. 

" Are they on their way home from 
the church?" I asked our coachman. 

" Not on their way home, no, Signo- 
rina," he replied. " They will drive up 
and down the road two, three hours yet, 
that they may show themselves. It is 
the custom so. Then all the ragazze 
see what a fine thing it is to be married." 
And with a sage nod, the vetturino 
whipped up his horses as we approached 

[39] 



Italian Vignettes 

a village. There were some half dozen 
of these hamlets to be gone through be- 
fore we came to Marigliano, and at the 
entrance to each one the same perform- 
ance was repeated. The driver would 
rouse his sturdy little beast with loud 
encouragement and mighty crackings 
of his whip, and we would rattle down 
the single street at a gallop, a dozen or 
so dogs barking madly at the wheels 
and all the inhabitants turning out to 
see, from the urchins who seemed to 
spring miraculously from the ground, 
to the men playing cards at little tables 
outside the osterie (inns). Each time 
I would ask: "Is this Marigliano, 
then?" And each time the answer 

[40] 



To Marigliano 

would be: "Not yet, Signorina. 
Still a little patience." 

To Marigliano, however, we came at 
last, and found it patterned after all 
the previous hamlets, with the road 
forming a central street from which the 
houses straggled off on either side. A 
very httle inquiry established the exact 
location of the dwelling of " Sebastiano 
Esposito, dealer in fine wines " ; and as 
our carriage stopped before the low 
arch of the doorway, Signor Esposito 
himself came out, followed by a short, 
round little woman, whose face wore 
the prematurely aged look of the 
worker in the fields. We did not fol- 
low strictly the lines laid down by the 

[41] 



Italian Vignettes 

younger Sebastiano for the ensuing 
scene ; but when it finally penetrated to 
the understanding of his father and 
mother that we actually came from that 
far-oif America that had swallowed up 
their son — that we even brought a mes- 
sage from him — there was no lack of 
dramatic effect. We were enveloped 
in a sort of exclamatory cloud, and 
borne somehow out of the carriage and 
through the low arch-way into a little 
walled space, half court, half garden, 
where a wooden table stood under a 
scraggly tree and a few hens wandered 
domestically about. Here I told my 
tale — how Sebastiano was at work on 
the great new railway station being 

[42] 



To Marigliano 

built in the city of Washington, which 
was the capital of the Stati Uniti; how 
he was beginning to learn a few words 
of Enghsh; and was " fat and well and 
beautiful." Also how he desired that 
his good father and mother should send 
him by me cloth for a suit of wedding 
clothes, not because he was going to be 
maiTied but "because in America they 
have the habit of going clean " — and 
apparently nothing short of an Italian 
wedding garment could come up to the 
American ideal in this respect. I 
ended by presenting the letter from 
Sebastiano himself, and the package 
containing the rose-embroidered " beau- 
tifulness." 

[43] 



Italian Vignettes 

It was the "little brother," a stocky 
urchin of twelve with the round face 
and merry eyes of his senior, who read 
the letter. His father stood at one side 
watching him, evidently divided be- 
tween interest in the news from his eld- 
est son and pride in the scholastic 
attainments of his youngest. One of 
the sisters was beside my chair — ^the 
other, I was informed, was away at a 
festa — and from time to time as the 
reading progressed, she would put out a 
timid hand and touch my sleeve, as 
though to assure herself of the reaUty 
of the scene. Only the mother was 
absorbed beyond any other conscious- 
ness in the word from over the sea. 

[44] 



To Marigliano 

She leaned towards the reader with a 
tense eagerness, her wrinkled brown 
face working with emotion, the tears 
running unheeded down her cheeks to 
drop on the " beautifulness " she held 
tightly clasped in her two arms. Noth- 
ing would induce her to open the pack- 
age, but now and then she carried it 
passionately to her hps. 

"The Signorina must pardon her," 
said her husband apologetically, when 
the letter was finished. "We have not 
heard from our son for many weeks; 
and each day she has journeyed to the 
Post Office, poverina, and come back 
weeping because there was nothing. 
This is a blessed hour for her." The 

[45] 



Italian Vignettes 

Signorina's own eyes were not quite 
dry as she protested against the need 
for apology. 

Then our host began to bestir him- 
self with zealous hospitahty, and would 
have spread the table then and there 
with everything in his larder and even, 
I think, have slaughtered one of the 
wandering hens the better to do honor 
to the occasion, had we not protested 
that we had but just come from our 
cotflazione and could not conceivably 
partake of a single morsel. But a 
glass of one of the " fine wines " it was 
quite impossible to refuse; and pres- 
ently a pitcher full of a pale topaz 
liquid appeared — "a wine you can 

[46] 



To Marigliano 

drink like water, Signorina ; made from 
our own grapes." 

So we sat on in the little court, sip- 
ping and talking, till the shadows grew 
long and our coachman impatient. And 
when the good-byes did come at last to 
be said, they were said as between old 
friends. 

" Never shall we forget this after- 
noon, Signorina," said Sebastiano's 
father earnestly as he stood beside the 
carriage. And looking back, as we 
rattled away down the Marigliano 
street, we felt that neither should we 
forget the group we left waving to us 
from the doorway — the stalwart man; 
the sturdy boy with the merry eyes ; the 

[4T] 



Italian Vignettes 

pretty, curly-haired girl; and above all 
the mother, with her toilworn face il- 
lumined by that love which is the golden 
thread that makes all womanhood akin. 



[48] 



Ill 



INTO THE GOLDEN 
AGE 



Into the Golden Age 

" Many . . . flock to him every day^ and 
fleet the time carelessly^ as they did in the 
golden world." — Shakespeare, 

fTn HIS is not an epoch which takes 
-*- kindly, on the whole, to hfe in a 
Forest of Arden. Nevertheless, scat- 
tered here and there even through our 
workaday world are oases of peace 
where the Golden Age does seem to 
have hngered, in all its charm of sim- 
plicity and glad youthf ulness ; and of 
all these spots, surely there is none 
fairer than the island on whose cloudy 

[51] 



Italian Vignettes 

mass the eyes of the sojourner in 
Naples so often turn. Capri! — there 
is a foretaste of enchantment in the 
very sound of the word, as though the 
Isle of Goats were rather an Isle of 
Dreams, radiant with all the glories of 
imagination. 

And an Isle of Dreams it proves in- 
deed, from the first moment when the 
pufling slip of a steamer that has 
brought you from Naples or Sorrento 
drops anchor in the shadow of the 
jagged cHfFs, and you look down 
over the rail at the flotilla of gaily 
painted rowboats gathered round. 
There are grumblers who object to 
the inconvenience involved in the 
I 52 ] 



Into the Golden Age 

transfer of themselves and their lug- 
gage to these small craft, and say hard 
things of the municipal government for 
not building out a substantial pier at 
which passengers could be landed direct 
from the steamer; but the dreamer 
treats such murmurs with the contempt 
they deserve. Not for many piers nor 
any amount of convenience would he 
exchange the joys of that brief row on 
the " summer sea," with a summer sky 
overhead, and the sound of mandolin 
music in his ears, and the gleam of sun- 
light on the houses of the marina as 
his boat draws near the shore. Of 
course these joys can all be dampened 
by a downpour of rain ; but if you have 

[63] 



Italian Vignettes 

never experienced rain yourself at 
Capri, you find it difficult to sym- 
pathize with the woes of those who have 
— or indeed to conceive of such a moist 
condition existing at all. 

The uniqueness of disembarkation at 
the island is sustained even when you 
finally step ashore. Instead of blue- 
bloused porters to take your baggage, 
a group of women are in waiting who 
swing heavy bags onto their heads and 
attack the trunks with Amazonian ease. 
At the end of the landing-stage are the 
carriages, mostly like victorias that have 
been folded together and never fully 
opened out again, whose sturdy ponies 
wear tufts of long feathers on their 

[54] 



Into the Golden Age 

head-pieces and make a great jingling 
with the bells of their harness. You 
pack yourself into one of these equip- 
ages and are driven away — ^up the long 
white road, past jealously guarded 
villas and fragrant orchards, to the lit- 
tle town nesthng between the hills. 
Here are most of the hotels, of varying 
degrees of excellence, some with gar- 
dens and some without, but almost all 
commanding views that would glorify 
a mud hut. Our windows looked out 
over a stretch of emerald garden to the 
turquoise of the sea, from which rose 
on the left the pointed mass of the 
Faraghoni Rocks — warm brown under 
the sunhght, deepening into purple 

[65] 



Italian Vignettes 

when the evening shadows fell, ghostly 
and mysterious in the pallor of moon- 
light. With such pictures to feast the 
eyes and imagination, what matters the 
primitiveness of your room-furnish- 
ings or the f aintness of the light emitted 
at night from your solitary candle? 

The " trippers " — as true Capriotes 
scornfully term those personally- con- 
ducted ones who see Capri "between 
boats "—spend the major part of their 
time in the Blue Grotto. Doubtless 
one should not miss this wonder of the 
island ; and indeed it is pleasant enough 
to row around from the Marina Grande, 
close under the rocky cliffs whose crests 
are touched with verdure and whose 

[56] 



Into the Golden Age 

water-washed feet are bestrewn with the 
clustering red flowers of the coral. The 
sea is marvelously translucent here, full 
of changing color and of strange life; 
but the entrance into the Grotto itself 
is calculated to try even a courageous 
spirit, and enjoyment of the experi- 
ences within is apt to be sadly marred 
by doubts as to the possibility of get- 
ting out again afterwards. Taken al- 
together, I think the expedition comes 
to stand rather in the light of a duty 
to the sojourner on the island. Far 
pleasanter is it to walk or drive on terra 
firma — up to Anacapri, perhaps, past 
the Madonna who from her niche of 
rock seems to shed perpetual benedic- 

[57] 



Italian Vignettes 

tion alike on the peasant girl who drops 
the burden from her head v/hile she 
murmurs a prayer, on the youth whis- 
tling at the heels of his patient donkey, 
or the forestieri glancing carelessly into 
their Baedekers. 

Or perhaps you choose to climb the 
steep path that leads to the legendary 
cliiF of Tiberius and the ruins of his 
villa. It is a very steep path indeed, 
in places, and the sun beats down hotly; 
but there is no lack of diversion to 
shorten the way. The views are ex- 
quisite — orchards and green slopes and 
white villas, with glimpses of the sea all 
around — and then, the tarantella 
dancers! There are at least three de- 

[58] 



Into the Golden Age 

tachments of these, who waylay you at 
different stages, and abuse each other 
with amazing fluency and picturesque- 
ness of language. We chose the mid- 
dle group, partly because the waylaying 
girl was so classically lovely and partly 
because our sympathy was aroused by 
the difficulties of her position. All the 
forestieri, she explained, either paused 
at the first station or waited till they 
reached the last one, where was "la 
Carohna" — evidently a popular favor- 
ite. 

" The Signorina perceives this is very 
discouraging for us; and moreover the 
old woman down there" — pointing to 
an ancient crone from whose clutches 

[59] 



Italian Vignettes 

we had with difficulty escaped a few 
moments earUer — " she has her mouth 
filled with evil lies concerning us, a bad 
Easter to her." 

We signified our intention of ignor- 
ing the " evil lies," and allowed our- 
selves straightway to be led by our vin- 
dictive little beauty into the bare, white- 
washed room of a low cabin. She drew 
forward a couple of chairs, took down 
her castanets from their hook on the 
wall, and called her companion. An 
older woman, perhaps the mother, fur- 
nished the music — a tambourine shaken 
rhythmically — and in an instant the two 
girls were in the full swing of that won- 
derful dance of the South, born of sun- 

[60] 



Into the Golden Age 

light and mirth and the memories of 
an olden day when Gods mixed with 
mortals in sweet familiarity. 

Beyond the tarantella stations, higher 
even than the last of the " authentic " 
spots whence Tiberian victims were 
hurled, stands a little hermitage. Here 
you may write your name in the Vis- 
itors' Book, or, more profitably, linger 
by the statue of the Madonna and look 
across the wonderful blue water to Sor- 
rento in its cliff niche; and behind you 
over the island, with its scattered villas 
bowered in green and its little town 
dropped between the two elevations of 
Anacapri and the Capo di Tiberio, 
where you stand. 

[61] 



Italian Vignettes 

But the quintessence of charm at 
Capri is in the villa life. Quite a little 
colony of delightful people — Enghsh, 
Americans, and Italians, artists and 
dreamers — spend a good part of the 
year there, in homes that convert one 
to a belief in fairy-tale wonders. I 
shall never forget a breakfast that took 
place within the hospitable precincts of 
one of these homes — a dazzling white 
gem of a villa that is nested on the hill 
half-way between the town and the 
Marina Grande, and whose Saracenic 
tower commands one of the fairest 
views in all the world's breadth. The 
gateway gives on the main road. En- 
tering, you descend a short flight of 

[62] 



Into the Golden Age 

stone steps into a little garden where 
slender iris grows and a tiny fountain 
murmurs its song of ancient legend. 
Thence you pass into the house itself 
under a mosaic plaque of many-tinted 
marbles, bits of precious africano and 
cipellino and verde antico found on 
the place — for you cannot turn up an 
inch of soil at Capri without coming 
upon some such ghosts of Roman mag- 
nificence. We breakfasted out on a 
brick-floored terrace, with a glowing 
portiere hung at one end to keep off 
draughts, and flowers ablaze on the 
table. In front of us a pear-tree leaned 
over, making a snowy tracery against 
the molten turquoise of the sky; below 

[63] 



Italian Vignettes 

was the marina^ washed bv the waters 
of the turquoise Bay; off to the right 
rose the rounded mass of lo Capo, with 
between us and it many a patch of white 
that told of more fruit-trees in blossom. 
A little bird was singing overhead; the 
March air was as balmy as that of June. 
Nor was the breakfast itself un- 
worthy of its setting. It was all Italian, 
from the tiny oysters baked in their 
opalescent shells to the finocchio (cul- 
tivated fennel) we ate raw with our 
crackers and cheese. Later we were 
taken into the kitchen where the feast 
had been prepared and met its presid- 
ing genius, who with native Italian 
courtesy made us smilingly free of his 

[64] 



Into the Golden Age 

domain. The white-tiled oven with its 
sparse holes, the shining copper vessels 
hanging on the immaculate walls, might 
all have been part of a Roman villa of 
the old days, such a villa, perhaps, as 
that dreamful "White Nights" which 
Pater's genius makes into so finely sig- 
nificant a background for the boyhood 
of his Marius. 

It would be an endless tale, were one 
to attempt the telling of all that may 
be done with the golden days at Capri. 
There is the magnificent walk built by 
Krupp, the famous German gun- 
maker, which will take you down — 
looping along the cliffs — to the Pic- 
cola Marina^ where you can have a car- 



Italian Vignettes 

riage meet and bring you back to your 
starting-point by way of a long circuit 
over the island. Perhaps you will be 
as fortunate in your driver as we were, 
and so get a glimpse of a peasant in- 
terior; foT Carmine took us to his own 
house, of which he is justly proud. He 
built it largely through the assistance 
of two American ladies who live on the 
island and play the pretty part of provi- 
dence to not a few of the inhabitants, 
and it is a model of neatness and com- 
fort. We sat in the main room and 
drank some of the wine made from Car- 
mine's own grapes, while his children 
— little velvet-eyed tots — danced the 
tarantella for us after an adorable 

[66] 



Into the Golden Age 

baby fashion of their own, and then 
filled our hands with flowers — dark, 
fragrant violets, and the delicate pink 
cyclamen you see everywhere starring 
the grass. 

Then, you can climb up to the 
broad plateau where frowns the gray 
ruin of Barbarossa's Castle, and look 
across to Naples in its rocky crescent 
with Vesuvius at one tip. From Ve- 
suvius, indeed, you seldom get away, 
wherever your steps may chance to lead 
you. The great fire-mountain seems 
the tutelary spirit of all the region 
around; even when it is mist-shrouded 
from the eyes of your body, you are 
none the less subtly conscious of its 

[67] 



Italian Vignettes 

presence. Mr. Henry Coleman, the 
artist who came to Capri to spend thirty 
days and has remained thirty years, has 
a pastel series that he calls " Songs of 
Vesuvius" and that show it in many 
moods and under many conditions — in 
the flush of summer dawns, hooded in 
winter snows, dim in the calm starlight. 
It is interesting, also, to wander 
through the town itself; to climb the 
steep narrow steps that oftentimes form 
the streets ; to watch the tailors making 
up suits of the white homespun that is 
woven from the wool of the Capri 
sheep. A dress costs from seven to nine 
dollars, and is evolved by the simple 
process of pinning yards of the stuff 

[68] 



Into the Golden Age 

about the purchaser and then cutting it 
to the necessary shape. 

There is very little begging in Capri, 
and — according to the boast of the in- 
habitants — no crime. 

"If it becomes known that a certain 
one has done wrong," Carmine told us, 
"the Sindaco (Mayor) at once sends 
him away from the island — over to 
Naples, where the folk are already 
evil." 

Moreover, in all the volcanic up- 
heavals that have gone on for centuries 
all around, Capri has remained un- 
shaken and secure. An isle of dreams 
in very truth, an isle of the Golden Age ! 
And when you have left it, and come 

[69] 



Italian Vignettes 

back into the world of rapid transit, of 
electricity and commerce, it is restful 
just to remember, now and again, that 
over there under the luminous Italian 
sky, kissed by the waves of " the tideless 
summer sea," there is such a Land of 
Heart's Desire, 

" Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood. 
But j oy is wisdom, Time an endless song." 



[ 70] 



IV 

IMPRESSIONS IN ROME 



Impressions in Rome 

TT is Marion Crawford, I think, who 
-^ says that it takes twenty years 
to know Rome superficially. In the 
sense in which he meant it, this is in- 
dubitably true ; but happily for those of 
us to whom destiny denies such length 
of time, it is also true that in as many 
days he who will can learn much of the 
wondrous charm that haunts the Eter- 
nal City. Only, he must first have made 
a conscientious attempt to comply with 
the demands of his Baedeker, and so 
feel free to let his steps and his im- 
agination stray whither they will. 

[73] 



Italian Vignettes 

Personally, I have never found the 
majority of the churches in Rome sym- 
pathetic. The exteriors, indeed, are 
often picturesquely charming, with 
their yellow fa9ades standing out 
against the molten turquoise of the sky, 
and tufts of grass and flowers grow- 
ing in their every crack and crevice; 
but the interiors are too apt to be mod- 
ernized into a cold insignificance. Nev- 
ertheless, my rule has its proving ex- 
ception, for nowhere in the city do I 
love more to linger than in the little 
Church of Santa Maria in AracoeH. 
Standing on a spur of the CapitoHne 
Hill, it presents a rough and unfinished 
front to the gaze of anyone who as- 

[74] 



Impressions in Rome 

cends the long flight of stairs leading 
to its main entrance — stairs at the foot 
of which, says tradition, the Tribune 
Rienzi was murdered by the people 
whom he had once dreamed of recreat- 
ing and making free. Stories of all 
kinds cluster about the ancient stones 
of the building. The name Aracoeli 

(Altar of Heaven) is commonly sup- 
posed to be derived from a revelation 
vouchsafed to the Emperor Octavius; 
but I like better the version I once 
heard from a Catholic prelate who had 
lived long in Rome. According to him, 
Ara is a corruption of the Latin Arcc 

(citadel), and the designation com- 
memorates the penetration of Christian- 

[75] 



Italian Vignettes 

ity here into the very heart and fortress 
of the old Roman civilization. 

It is well to visit Santa Maria in 
Aracoeli in the late afternoon, when 
the sun filters a little golden radiance 
through the high windows into the vel- 
vet dusk of the interior, and reveals its 
quaint combination of Christian and 
pagan features— the dissimilar antique 
columns taken at random from classic 
ruins, the sheen on rich bits of pave- 
ment, the Pinturicchio frescoes in one 
of the chapels. No more delightful 
pages from Fourteenth Century life 
are to be found in all Rome than these 
latter, which depict certain scenes from 
the life of San Bernardino of Siena. 

[76] 



Impressions in Rome 

The section showing the burial of the 
Saint, especially, is a very gallery of 
medifieval figures — mourning monks, 
gay young pages, stately women, 
richly clad men. And looking at the 
lordly indifference which the artist has 
given to the great noble — striding along 
preceded by his page, and with scarcely 
a glance for the humble figure on the 
bier, — looking at the sorrow of the 
faithful few and the careless curiosity 
in the expression of most of the spec- 
tators, you look deep down into the 
heart of that departed age — the same 
age to which belong those worn figures 
in knightly gown and cap which are 
carved on the slabs beneath your feet. 

[T7] 



Italian Vignettes 

It is a good place to muse over the 
ashes of forgotten things, here where 
Gibbon is said first to have conceived 
the plan of tracing Rome's decay and 
dissolution. Then, when the dimness 
grows too chill and you are ready to 
come into the stir of life again, turn, 
not to the main portal, but to the little 
door half hidden at one side of the 
church; and when the leathern curtain 
has fallen behind you, pause a moment 
there at the head of the narrow yellow 
steps w^here beggars sit basking in the 
sun — and look out, over the ruins of 
the Forum and the "solitudes of the 
Campagna," to the immutable blue 
mountains beyond. 

[78] 



Impressions in Rome 

Another place which has a charm of 
atmosj)here quite distinct from the con- 
sideration of any concrete treasures it 
may contain, is the Vatican. The vast 
irregular mass of buildings, homely 
enough from the exterior, turns into an 
enchanted palace for one who comes 
often and lingers lovingly. After you 
have marvelled over the dramatic force 
of the Laocoon and rejoiced in the glo- 
rious youthfulness of the Belvedere 
Apollo, after the frescoes of Raphael 
have spoken to your imagination and 
your eyes have grown familiar with the 
Titan shapes of the Sistine Chapel — 
then, you wall become aware that the 
fascination of the whole, the ensemble 

[■79] 



Italian Vignettes 

of which these are but parts, has the 
while been creeping over your spirit. 
You will find yourself fallen irrevocably 
under the spell of these quiet galleries 
with their rows of still, white denizens, 
and h^re and there a dash of color 
where one of the gorgeously mediaeval 
Swiss Guards stands warming himself 
over a brazier of burning charcoal; the 
spell of these rooms, whose walls are 
living with soft colors and whose win- 
dows look out on some forgotten 
court with murmurous fountain and 
grass-grown stones. 

I remember once, while I was waiting 
for admission to the Borgia Apart- 
ments, wandering into a particularly 

[80] 



Impressions in Rome 

long, cold corridor. It was quite de- 
serted, for there was nothing to attract 
visitors unless it were some savant come 
to read the Latin inscriptions with 
which the walls were lined; but the 
deep embrasures of the windows 
framed the most exquisite pictures 
— distant glimpses of the city, and 
close at hand a fortress-like round 
tower and the beginning of the 
wall which masks the secret passage 
leading to the Castel Sant' An- 
gelo. It was through this passage that 
the Popes were wont to escape when- 
ever they felt themselves no longer safe 
in the Vatican. How far away those 
old days of tumult seem to one who 

[81] 



Italian Vignettes 

looks out at the wild flowers clinging 
along the brown ridge of wall! And 
no less remote, in this strange city with- 
in a city, is the busy life of the present. 
Those lines of Keats, 

** Thou still unravished bride of quietness, 
Thou fosterchild of Silence and slow Time/' 

might be inscribed over the doors of 
the Vatican. Better than any other 
words I know do they express its es- 
sential charm — the charm of things old 
and remote, yet ever new in beauty and 
significance. 

For quite different reasons, the ap- 
proach to the Vatican is almost as de- 
lightful as the palace itself. Crossing 

[82] 



Impressions in Rome 

the "blond Tiber" by the Bridge of 
Sant' Angelo and passing under the 
crenellated walls of the great tomb- 
fortress itself, you come to the two 
streets of the Borgo Vecchio and the 
Borgo Nuovo. It is well to elect the 
latter, because then you will be spared 
the sight and sound of the anachronis- 
tic tram. There is no hour of the day, 
I think, when the sun really shines into 
the Borgo save at high noon — and even 
then his beams have somewhat of mel- 
ancholy in them, as though they felt 
quite out of place and ill at ease. The 
two sides of the narrow street are lined 
with tiny shops and forbidding palaces 
— like gaunt gray wolves, these latter, 

[8*3] 



Italian Vignettes 

defending the Papal City against the 
invasions of modern progress. The 
shops are generally entirely open as to 
their fronts, and some of them have 
strings of onions and red peppers fes- 
tooned artistically about the walls, 
while others show glimpses of dim 
bronzes and faded brocades. Those of 
the latter type predominate, for the 
Borgo is a famous place for dealers in 
antiquities. In a dusky space about 
six feet square you will find the strang- 
est conglomeration of articles — carved 
stone bowls that look as though they 
might have belonged to the age of Au- 
gustus, and quaintly shaped bits of sil- 
ver which have very palpably been 

[84] 



Impressions in Rome 

manufactured in that of Victor Eman- 
uel III. And occasionally, glancing 
about, your eyes will be gladdened by 
a wonderful depth of color or purity of 
line in some piece of majolica or capo- 
di-monte perhaps lying neglected un- 
der a gray coating of dust. To bar- 
gain with the owner of these things is 
a thrilling and educative process, the 
fascination of which grows upon you. 
And then to come out afterwards and 
walk the length of the street, flattening 
yourself against the walls to escape 
passing teams, till you emerge at last 
in the great openness and light of the 
Piazza of St. Peter's — passing so from 
night into a blaze of noontide! No 

[85] 



Italian Vignettes 

matter how familiar you are with the 
sight, it comes each time with fresh ef- 
fectiveness. The vastness of the paved 
space, the central obelisk, the twin 
fountains with wind-driven spray, the 
church at the back with Bernini's colon- 
nades spreading out on either side like 
enfolding arms — these constitute an 
impression of which it is impossible to 
Weary. On a hot day it is a blinding 
study in yellow, and you are glad to 
escape into the shadow of the colon- 
nades and grateful for the cool sound 
of the water as it ripples over the edge 
of the basins onto the pavement. At 
night, it is a poet's dream in ivory and 
silver ; but perhaps at no time is it more 

[86] 



Impressions in Rome 

impressive than as I saw it once after a 
great church function in Holy Week, 
when it was Hterally overswept by a 
surging black wave of people. There 
had been rain during the afternoon; the 
fountains looked blurred and misty; 
and in the twilight grayness the pro- 
portions of the whole assumed a magni- 
tude that had in it something weird and 
unearthly. 

Of late years, Rome has been in- 
fected with a mania for things Angli- 
can, and afternoon tea has become a 
well-established institution. There is 
scarcely a hotel whose parlor or winter- 
garden does not exhibit, about four 
o'clock, a mushroom growth of daintily 

[87] 



Italian Vignettes 

appointed tables. But the true seeker 
after impressions does not go to the 
hotels for tea. Indeed, if he be wise 
he will not even stop at one of the res- 
taurants on the Corso — entertaining as 
it is to sit out on the pavement in front 
of one of these and see all Rome and 
the strangers within her gates pass by. 
Instead, if the day be fair, he will drive 
up to a certain trattoria on the Aven- 
tine that goes by the imposing title of 
Castel Costantino. Here is a long 
terrace, the view from which far more 
than compensates for the medicinal 
flavor of the beverages off^ered as re- 
freshment, and the thickness of the 
cups in which these are served. Oppo- 

[88] 



Impressions in Rome 

site is the green Palatine, and should 
the season be spring it presents a lumi- 
nous vision in the burning sunlight and 
beneath the unclouded sky. The warm 
tones of brick arches and the white 
gleam of fallen columns blend with the 
grass and shrubbery — reminders of .a 
dead past which is clasped in the arms 
of a living and ever-renewing nature. 
Perhaps a party of German semina- 
rists come out on one of the spurs, and 
their scarlet gowns add a touch of vivid 
relief to the whole; while far off, there 
is always the misty line of the moun- 
tains which enclose the Campagna. 

The Campagna! — no visit to Rome 
is worthy the name unless the ^dsitor 

[89] 



Italian Vignettes 

learns to know and appreciate this 
strange tract of land, untitled, fever- 
haunted, yet full of a weird and indi- 
vidual enchantment. I have driven 
into it on breathless days when thun- 
der was in the air, and the distant crests 
of the Albine and Sabine hills stood out 
with that peculiar distinctness which 
presages a storm, and the clouds were 
massed overhead as though by the hand 
of a Michelangelo. I have been 
there on sunny mornings when a meet 
was in progress and the road was en- 
cumbered with carriages and automo- 
biles — automobiles in the Campagna! — 
and the uneven ground was dotted with 
the pink coats of the huntsmen; and I 

[90] 



Impressions in Rome 

have been there on slumberous after- 
noons when the only signs of life were 
the flocks of grazing sheep. The at- 
mosphere is always the same. The 
monotonous Knes of the aqueducts, the 
tombs of the Appian Way, the sparse 
cypress-trees, the grassy hillocks, — all 
alike are steeped in an unfathomable 
and melancholy mystery. "Here 
sleeps the goddess Rome," says an Ital- 
ian poet ; and it seems indeed as if from 
this ruin and desolation there went up 
perpetual incense to some mighty spirit 
of the past. 

These are a few of the impressions 
which may be gleaned in Rome. They 
are only a few, because if it takes 

[91] 



Italian Vignettes 

twenty years to know " the Lady of the 
C*enturies " superficially, it would need 
twenty times twenty years to exhaust 
the delights she offers. Each new day 
Kved with her brings new revelations, 
till you grow to feel that there is no 
stone or clod which has not its part in 
the spell sh^ weaves. At first per- 
haps you are troubled by the new Rome 
that has grown up on the skeleton of 
the old ; you feel aggrieved by the pres- 
ence of anything which cannot be dated 
back to the Middle Ages at least. But 
this feeling wears away. Go up on the 
Janiculum where stands the great 
bronze statue of Garibaldi as a sort of 
embodiment of the United Italy of our 

[92] 




The great bronze statue of Garibaldi 



Impressions in Rome 

day. There is a noble dignity and 
force in that figure ; and the attitude, as 
he sits his horse so steadfastly, look- 
ing down upon the Vatican, lends elo- 
quence to the simple words engraved 
on the pedestal: "Roma o Morte."* 

Some idea of the long agony which 
was the price paid for the achievement 
of Rome comes to you if you will drive 
on a little farther, out through the 
Porta San Pancrazio to the Vascello — 
a half ruinous building which takes its 
name from its resemblance to the hull 
of a vessel. It was here that for two 
months, during the brief life of the re- 
public in 1849, the Italians under Gari- 

* " Rome or Death." 
[93] 



Italian Vignettes 

baldi held out against the besieging 
French troops. The stone walls are all 
scarred and chipped by cannon-balls; 
and somehow, reading the stirring in- 
scription which commemorates those 
who fought and died for the ideal of 
liberty, that heroic defense "without 
hope of victory " becomes very appeal- 
ing. You are glad that Rome has 
shown herself not unmindful, now in 
her freedom, of the struggles of those 
darker days; and you begin also to 
understand that those pages in her his- 
tory are not the least in interest because 
the newest. After all, this is one se- 
cret of her perennial charm — this 
power she has of transmuting every- 

[ 94 ] 



Impressions in Rome 

thing with which she is concerned " into 
something rich and rare." The Rome 
of the Caesaxs, the Rome of the Popes, 
the Rome of the Risorgimento, has each 
its own significance; they overUe and 
jostle one another, but for the "seeing 
eye" they are blended under all out- 
ward contrasts in a profound and eter- 
nal harmony. 



[95] 



THE CAMPO DEI FIORI 



The Campo Dei Fiori 

fT^ HERE is in Rome a little square, 
'*' lying south of the busy Corso 
Vittorio Emanuele, which every Wed- 
nesday morning wakens from its usual 
state of sleepy desertion into a turbu- 
lent and clamorous activity. Booths 
spring up mushroomhke, picturesque 
peasants and vendors of antiquities 
from the Borgo throng the place with 
their merchandise, and the astonished 
tourist who penetrates to the center of 
this weekly market finds temptingly 
displayed before his eyes every object 

[99] 



Italian Vignettes 

for which he could conceivably have 
any need, firom a suit of second-hand 
clothes to a ring warranted to be at 
least three centuries old. The Campo 
dei Fiori, or Field of Flowers, the 
Romans have christened the spot; but 
the less poetic English residents of the 
Eternal City, who make of it a favor- 
ite hunting-ground for antiques, are ac- 
customed to designate it as the scene of 
"the Hag Fair." 

Call it by whichever name you will, 
it presents a bright and animated sight 
on a clear Wednesday morning, when 
the sky overhead is luminously blue, 
and the sun glints on strangely shaped 
bronze utensils and picks out the gold 
[ 100 ] 



The Campo dei Fiori 

and silver tlireads of rich brocades, and 
the breeze rustles dehcate laces and sets 
the heads of gay flowers a-nodding. 
On one side of the square congregate 
the vendors of bronze and stone ware, 
of lamps and old jewelry. A few 
planks set across rude supports, with 
perhaps an upright beam at each of 
the four corners, form their booths. 
The small articles — rings, bracelets, 
brooches, and such knick-knacks — are 
laid out on the boards, while from the 
corner-sticks dangle lamps, bowls, and 
other larger pieces. On the other side 
of the narrow passage that cuts the 
square in half and is left clear for a 
seemingly endless procession of car- 
[101] 



Italian Vignettes 

riages and carts, you may find the deal- 
ers in brocades, laces, old clothing and 
notions. And everywhere, clustered 
about the booths and packing the nar- 
row spaces between, is a moving, ges- 
ticulating, chattering crowd of men, 
women, and children, of natives and 
forestieri, 

I have known of real " finds " made 
by discriminating buyers at the Field 
of Flowers ; and indeed you may almost 
always pick some odd or dainty sou- 
venir out of the heterogeneous display, 
if you are but armed with the requisite 
amount of patience and Italian. For 
instance, your fancy is taken with a 
quaintly shaped church lamp, perhaps, 
[ im ] 



The Campo dei Fiori 

or a bit of brocade whose colors have 
been toned by time to a soft harmony. 
You approach the booth whereon it is 
displayed with an elaborately prepared 
expression of detached carelessness, 
which does not deceive the alert vendor, 
who is instantly at your elbow. 

" How then may the Excellency be 
served this morning? Some lace? — 
marvelous lace, bought from a most 
ancient and noble family. Brocades? 
— will the Excellency so far trouble 
herself as to look upon this brocade in 
the sunlight?" 

The Excellency looks, with unmoved 
countenance; asks the price of half a 
dozen articles; and comes finally to the 
[103] 



Italian Vignettes 

lamp over which her soul secretly 
yearns. 

"That lamp? Ah, it is to be seen 
that the Excellency has the art soul; 
there is not another lamp like it in the 
Campo, for beauty and chastity of de- 
sign. And antiquity — ^ma! (A shrug, 
indicative of the aeons of history repre- 
sented by the article in question and 
quite inexpressible in mere words). 
The price? — a trifle, a nothingness, 
Excellency. Fifty francs." 

Here you start back with a look of 
amazed incredulity. "Fifty francs? 
Ma chef The lamp is not worth the 
half, the quarter of that sum; you have 
seen hundreds much finer" — et csetera, 
[104j] 



The Campo dei Fiori 

et caetera. The dealer protests that is 
impossible; swears by all the saints the 
lamp cost him fifty francs; addresses 
you in melting tones as '' figlia mia" 
(daughter mine) ; gesticulates; swings 
the lamp seductively under your eyes. 
You oppose a stony front to his flood 
of rhetoric, and make as if you would 
turn away. He follows you; seizes 
you by the arm. 

" Let the Excellency then name the 
just price! What will the Excellency 
give?" 

The Excellency might perhaps be 
induced to give fifteen francs. The 
outraged proprietor falls back with a 
sardonic laugh. 

[105] 



Italian Vignettes 

" Fifteen francs? For such a lamp, 
of such an antiquity, of such a beauti- 
fuhiess? Figlia mia, it is impossible, 
it is a madness ! " 

Then he subsides into pathos. The 
lamp cost him more, much more than 
what you offer. He is a poor man; is 
it then to utter destitution you would 
reduce him? But the times are bad, 
very bad; and for the sake of making 
an affair — the Excellency may have it 
for forty-five francs, ecco! *' Impossi- 
ble," you reiterate, " such a price is out 
of all reason; why not make a little 
combination, say twenty francs?" 
More protests, more references to the 
depth of ruin to which you would re- 
[106] 



The Campo dei Fiori 
duce his already poverty-stricken fam- 

iiy- 

"And an Excellency, too, who 
speaks so well the Italian! Giovanni," 
— this to his partner in trade — " is it 
not true that she speaks superlatively, 
hke an Italian, the Excellency?" 

Unsoftened even by such a tribute, 
— hopefully brought out by your ven- 
dor as his trump card — you shake your 
head; and the price of the lamp finally 
drops five francs. This process is re- 
peated until you are within one franc 
of the sum set as your ultimatum — and 
over that single franc you spend as 
much time and as many arguments as 
over the whole preceding twenty-nine. 
[107] 



Italian Vignettes 

The vendor works himself into a pas- 
sion of dramatic eloquence ; calls on the 
Madonna to be a witness of your 
cruelty; appeals to your justice, to your 
charity. At length, however, if you 
succeed in preserving that " quiet and 
unexcited demeanor" recommended by 
Baedeker for such occasions, and have 
sufficient self-command to turn your 
back and stroll away, you will in all 
probability find yourself pursued and 
the lamp thrust into your hands. 

'^' Ecco! it is here ! I give it, that I 
may have the honor of the Excellency's 
friendship." 

You eagerly grasp the coveted arti- 
cle and pay the twenty francs ; and the 
[ 108 ] 



The Campo dei Fiori 

individual who five minutes earlier was 
near to cursing your name, blandly 
pulls out his card, entreats you to visit 
his shop in the Borgo — where it will be 
his happiness to show you other things 
of a rarity and charm unexampled, — 
and bids you as exquisitely affable a 
"huon giorno'' as if you had just pre- 
sented him with a fortune. And so 
you pass on to the next stall, to repeat 
identically the same comedy. 

It is characteristic of the Rag Fair 

r 

that everything sold there is antique — 
or said to be. Even the ragged urchin 
who pursues you with papers of safety- 
pins, lifts his big brown eyes to your 
face and humorously murmurs "molto 
[109] 



Italian Vignettes 

antico, signora " (very antique, lady), 
as he exhibits his wares. Only the 
flowers are exempt from the general 
rule. They were plucked at dawn, you 
are told; and the deep purple violets 
and graceful frisia, the mignonette and 
the many-tinted anemones, make a 
radiant springtime around the worn 
bronze statue of Giordano Bruno, monk 
and philosopher, who was burned here 
as a heretic in the Sixteenth Century — 
for it was in this square, so full now of 
bustle and brightness, that the faggots 
used to be piled in the grim days of the 
Inquisition. 

Such contrasts of past and present, 
of tragedy and continuing life, are part 
[ 110 ] 



The Campo dei Fiori 

of the breath of Rome; and you ponder 
them as you make your way out of the 
press in the Piazza, the shrill voices of 
the hawkers in your ears, and clasped 
tightly in your arms the precious pack- 
ages — generally done up in dirty news- 
paper — which you have acquired 
through the exercise of so much pa- 
tient diplomacy. You can hardly wait 
until you get back to your rooms to ex- 
amine them; and if this has been your 
initial introduction to the Campo dei 
Fiori, your soul is probably uplifted 
within you by the extraordinary bar- 
gains you conceive yourself to have 
made, whexeas if you are an old habitue, 
you reflect sadly that in all human 
[111] 



Italian Vignettes 

probabilities the article for which you 
paid twenty francs could, with only a 
little more effort on your part, have 
been gotten quite as well for ten. 



[m] 



VI 



AN AUDIENCE AT THE 
VATICAN 



An Audience at the 
Vatican 

T T is not so difficult now to secure an 
-•' audience at the Vatican as it was 
during the closing years of Leo XIII's 
pontificate. Pius X is stronger than 
his predecessor and is besides especially 
interested in Americans, so that a letter 
of introduction to Monsignor Ken- 
nedy, Rector of the American College 
at Rome, or some personal acquaint- 
ance with an ecclesiastic, generally 
suffices to secure the square of white 
paper bearing the Papal arms and set- 

[lis] 



Italian Vignettes 

ting forth the day and hour on which 
you will be admitted to see the Holy 
Father. 

If you have never been inside the 
Vatican save as a tourist, that bit of 
paper assumes a certain solemn grand- 
eur in your eyes. It means admission 
to those private apartments that are 
not in Baedeker, an approach to what a 
large part of civihzation holds to be the 
inmost heart of the Christian world. 
We, at any rate, experienced distinct 
anticipatory thrills when the appointed 
moment arrived, and gowned in decor- 
ous black, with black lace veils on our 
heads, we found ourselves rattling over 
the Bridge of Sant' Angelo and 
[116] 



An Audience at the Vatican 

through the narrow Borgo Vecchio to 
draw up under Bernini's Colonnade at 
the Portone di Bronzo (Great Bronze 
Doors), the main entrance to the Vati- 
can Palace. We were in a plebeian 
hired vehicle — otherwise we should have 
been permitted to drive around to the 
back of St. Peter's and into the Cortile 
San Damaso, one of the twenty-one 
courts scattered through the vast pile. 

From the Portone, you pass up a 
succession of stairways — with gorgeous 
red and yellow Swiss Guards stationed, 
halberd in hand, on every landing — to 
a spacious frescoed room, where you 
are allowed to pause a moment and re- 
cover the breath you have probably lost 
[117] 



Italian Vignettes 

during your climb. Then an imposing 
lacquey clad in magenta brocade- velvet, 
with powdered hair, knee-breeches, and 
buckled shoes, requests you to "have 
the gentility " to follow him, and leads 
you on to the room designated for the 
audience. A few seats aye ranged 
along the wall, — straight, high-backed 
chairs of dark wood — and if you have 
been wise and are a little early, you 
may sink down on one of these and ab- 
sorb the scene about you — the lofty 
room hung with mellow-tinted tapes- 
tries and magenta brocade that matches 
the lacqueys' coats ; the single table with 
its crucifix ; the two tall windows, whose 
white silk hangings are faintly stirred 
[118] 



An Audience at the Vatican 

by a breeze that seems to whisper of the 
Rome lying without, the Rome of St. 
Peter — and of Garibaldi. Yes, it al- 
most seems as if even here, to this inner 
fortress of the Leonine City, there 
pierced an eagle glance from the eyes 
of that bronze figure who sits his horse 
on the crest of the Janiculum, gazing 
eternally down at the dwelling of the 
PontiflF whose temporal power he 
helped to shatter. 

Meanwhile, there is a constant soft 
rustling going on about the door of the 
apartment in which you are waiting. 
A Noble Guard, in the charming uni- 
form which Mrs. Humphrey Ward de- 
scribes as that of " half dandy and half 
[119] 



Italian Vignettes 

god," passes through; or a purple-clad 
ecclesiastic; or Monsignor Bisleti, 
" Master of the Chamber to His Holi- 
ness," in charge of a party of distin- 
guished foreigners. The men all 
wear evening dress; the women must 
appear in black, with veils, but there is 
no embargo placed on the wearing of 
jewels, and the great ladies of the 
Black, or Church Party, when they at- 
tend a presentation fairly blaze with 
diamonds. 

A little bell, striking clear and sharp, 
though apparently at some distance, is 
the first warning you receive of the 
Pope's coming. Then a Noble Guard 
appears in the doorway; faces the room 
[ im ] 



An Audience at the Vatican 

for a tense instant; turns, and with his 
hand at salute drops on one knee. It 
is the signal. The people, who have 
risen, forming a semi-circle, sink Hke 
reeds swept by the wind ; and where the 
Guard had stood, stands a white-robed 
figure, with two priestly attendants 
dimly discernible in the shadow beyond. 
Very simply, with a smile that is in it- 
self a benediction, the Pope makes the 
round of the room, holding out his hand 
to each person to receive a kiss on the 
great amethyst that glows darkly on his 
third finger. At the farther door he 
turns, one hand upraised, and gives the 
Apostolic Benediction. 

The whole impression that remains 

[m] 



Italian Vignettes 

from the simple ceremony is one of 
extraordinary spiritual significance. 
Protestant or Catholic, in the moment 
when you see against the semi-circle of 
dusky kneeling figures that one form 
so resplendently white, when you look 
up into the face so instinct with benig- 
nant dignity and calm loveliness, you 
feel the thrill of nearness to a great 
fundamental force. Through all the 
wistful sadness that looks out of the 
eyes of Pius X, through all the weari- 
ness as of one who bears a heavy bur- 
den, you are conscious of the Pope — 
the individuality of the man merged in 
the idea of which he is the human sym- 
bol. 

[ 1^2 ] 






( 



^^**j|^ 










55 



ti5 



An Audience at the Vatican 

^lany devotees, when they come out 
from their audience, slip into St. 
Peter's to kiss the foot of the bronze 
Peter in whose place sits the Pontiff 
they have just saluted. Our protest- 
antism, however, though for the mo- 
ment much in abeyance, turned restive 
at this point, and we took our carriage 
where we had left it, at the bronze Por- 
tone. It was an open carriage, of 
course, — who that loves Rome will con- 
sent, unless urged by utmost stress of 
bad weather, to shut himself away from 
her sights? — and as we drove back to 
our hotel in the mellow afternoon light, 
many a glance was turned on our black 
veils, and now and again we caught a 
[123] 



Italian Vignettes 

murmur: "Ah, sono state dal Papa, 
quelle." (They've been to the Pope's, 
those others). At the hotel door we 
were met by our devoted facchino* 
Angelo, who is a patriot and a royalist, 
and shakes his head at the mention of 
the temporal power of the Papacy. 

"Veda, Signorina," he remarked, 
"col Papa non tengo; ma non e' e da 
dire, questo e un vero padre pei poveri." 
(You see, Signorina, I don't hold with 
the Pope ; but it's not to be denied that 
this one is a real father to the poor. ) 

A Father to the Poor! — a prouder 
title, is it not, than that of Papa-Re 
(Pope- King) for which the Church 
contends? ^ p . ^ 

[ IM] 



VII 



HOLY WEEK AND EAS 
TER IN ROME 



Holy Week and Easter 
IN Rome 

rW^ HE approach of Easter in Rome 
•*• brings the climax of what the citi- 
zens graphically describe as "the inva- 
sion." The foreigners who have been 
more or less in evidence through the 
winter multiply with a rapidity discon- 
certing to the lover of undiluted Italy; 
the galleries, so lately given over to 
" Silence and slow Time," become the 
hunting-grounds of the personally- 
conducted; and English is abroad in 
street and shop. 

As with us, each day in Holy Week 
[127] 



Italian Vignettes 

has its special observance; but it is on 
Maundy Thursday that the most char- 
acteristic and interesting ceremonies 
take place. Then every church in 
Rome has one chapel set apart to repre- 
sent the Holy Sepulchre, with the Host 
in a golden or silver urn on the altar, 
surrounded by lighted tapers and 
masses of flowers; and all through the 
afternoon throngs of the devout, with a 
fair sprinMing of the merely curious, 
make their way from one to the other of 
these consecrated spots. On one occa- 
sion, we noticed an especially dense 
crowd collected around the entrance to 
Santa Maria degli Angeli ( St. Mary of 
the Angels), the church Michelangelo 
[128] 



Holy Week and Easter in Rome 

made out of one of the vaulted halls of 
the Baths of Diocletian, and were en- 
lightened as to its meaning by an af- 
fable street-sweeper. 

" Cross quickly, signore mie" he 
urged, ''fe la Regina Madre" (It is 
the Queen JNIother — the pretty Italian 
equivalent for the harsher title of Dow- 
ager Queen.) 

King Humbert's widow was making 
the round of the churches with the other 
dwellers in Rome; and hurrying over, 
we were in time to see her as she came 
out, escorted by a couple of ecclesias- 
tics. At the door they kissed her hand, 
and she passed on to her carriage with 
a gracious little bow to the people 
[129] 



Italian Vignettes 

around. She is rather stout, and her 
face especially has grown too heavy for 
beauty; but her smile is still as charm- 
ing as when " the Pearl of Savoy " first 
won her way into the hearts of her 
Italian subjects. 

Of all the chapels, the loveliest is 
usually to be found in Santa Maria 
Libexatrice, the church attached to the 
Convent of the Perpetual Adoration, 
When we saw it, it was decked entirely 
in pure white blossoms ; two nuns in the 
white robes of the sisterhood knelt be- 
fore the altar, looking indeed — as the 
light from the candles fell on their 
veiled heads — like mystical brides of 
the Church; while out of the darkness 
[ 130 ] 



Holy Week and Easter in Rome 

of the choir came the sound of a 
woman's voice, intoning the solenm 
service. 

Unfortunately, it has a way of rain- 
ing in torrents on Holy Thursday, and 
towards five o'clock in the afternoon 
the Bridge of Sant' Angelo and the 
narrow ways leading to the Piazza of 
St. Peter's become choked with um- 
brella-bearing pedestrians and car- 
riages with their "hoods" up. You 
wonder, as you glance at the throng, 
how all these people are going to find 
accommodation in the basihca; and yet, 
when the leathern curtain has dropped 
behind you, your first impression is one 
of a dim sohtude. It is not until you 
[131] 



Italian Vignettes 

have passed up the nave towards the 
Pontifical Altar that you realize that 
several thousands of spectators are al- 
ready gathered there, with more being 
constantly added. Near this altar — 
where mass is celebrated only when the 
Pope is present in person^ — it is well to 
take your stand, facing the smaller altar 
in the apse. There twelve candles 
burn, to represent the Twelve Apostles ; 
and as the gloomy office of the " Tene- 
bras" is intoned by the attendant 
priests, one after the other of these 
flickers out, till in the darkness only a 
single spark is left — that of the central 
candle which represents the Christ. A 
pause follows ; then into the silence steal 
[ 132 ] 



Holy Week and Easter in Rome 

the first notes of the Miserere, sung by 
the Sistine Choir — unforgettable music, 
with its solemn burden of bass notes 
and that one pure strain which now 
floats softly out unaccompanied, and 
now soars high and clear over the full 
chorus. 

Scarcely is the singing at an end, 
when up to the Pontifical Altar is seen 
winding a long procession of Cardinals, 
Canons, and Acolytes. The Altar, for 
this occasion, is stripped of all covering 
and ornament, save for a couple of 
flasks of antique shape containing oil 
and wane. The contents of these are 
poured over the white marble; then, as 
the procession moves by, each Cardinal 
[133] 



Italian Vignettes 

and Canon in turn passes over the sur- 
face the sort of long-handled mop with 
which he is armed. For the most part, 
this ceremony of " purification " is per- 
formed in an exceedingly perfunctory 
manner — though I do remember one or 
two stout Canons who showed a certain 
housewifely zeal in their manipulation 
of the mops. 

We were fortunate enough to be di- 
rectly on the line of retreat of the pro- 
cession; and RampoUa, the Grand 
Seigneur of the Church, passed within 
finger's touch of us, followed by a 
group of lesser Cardinals, and of Can- 
ons looking oppressed enough in the 
gray squirrel capes that top their pur- 
[134] 



Holy Week and Easter in Borne 

pie robes. As for the Acolytes, they 
seemed to be dropping on their knees 
all about us, as a sumptuously gowned 
ecclesiastic, holding aloft a jewelled 
reliquary, appeared upon the little log- 
gia above the statue of St. Veronica. 
It is, I think, only on this day — and 
perhaps on Christmas — that the five 
special treasures of St. Peter's holy of 
holies are exhibited; and although it is 
impossible for the spectator to distin- 
guish St. Veronica's handkerchief from 
the head of St. Andrew, the scene itself 
— the dim church, the vast dome loom- 
ing overhead, the figure of the priest 
standing out high above the people 
with the light of tapers bringing gleams 
[135] 



Italian Vignettes 

from the gold of his vestments and 
flashing back from the gems in the reli- 
quaries as these are raised and lowered 
— the scene, decidedly, is of those 
which, appealing at once to the senses 
and to the imagination, Unger richly in 
the memory. 

The exhibition of the relics closes the 
Holy Thursday ceremonies at St. 
Peter's; and a few moments after- 
wards, as you stand on the steps lead- 
ing down from the portico, the whole 
Piazza below appears to be covered 
with an eddying black wave of human- 
ity. To find your carriage in the tan- 
gle is no simple matter — especially if, 
as in our own case, you have come in a 
[ 136 ] 



Holy Week and Easter in Rome 

hired vehicle and then forgotten the 
mystic number which, shrilled forth by 
some sturdy street uxchin, might sum- 
mon your vetturino out of the vasty 
night. Our only clue lay in the color 
of our horse, which was a unique and 
unhealthy yellow; but whether we 
should ever have been able to pick him, 
unaided, out of the involved throng of 
variously tinted quadrupeds, is more 
than I dare assert. Fortunately our 
driver was a shrewd old fellow and in- 
stituted a search from his end; still 
more fortunately, our paths happened 
to cross; and after a few uneasy mo- 
ments of ducking under the heads of 
horses and dodging between carriage- 
[137] 



Italian Vignettes 

wheels, we were able to whip out of the 
press. The rain had stopped, and a 
big round moon hung high above the 
city as we passed over the Ponte Sant' 
Angelo on our homeward way. 

On Good Friday darkness reigns in 
all the churches, and there is no music 
save for the Miserere sung at St. John 
Later an; but Saturday brings premoni- 
tory symptoms of the morrow's joyous 
festival. On the Spanish Steps — 
haunt of flower-vendors and models — 
lilies and other white blossoms are 
banked in dazzling masses; and all day 
the parish priests pass busily through 
the streets on their way to bless the 
houses. We knew nothing of this cus- 
[ 1'38 ] 



Holy Week and Easter in Rome 

torn, and consequently were sufficiently 
mystified when, late on Saturday 
afternoon, our favorite facchino. An- 
gelo, appeared at the door of our sit- 
ting-room ^vith the announcement; 

" Signorina, c' e il prete" (the priest 
is here). 

A few questions brought an explana- 
tion, which Angelo was evidently some- 
what scandalized to find necessary. We 
learned that it is the duty of the priest 
to visit every house in his parish on 
Easter Even in order to purify it for 
the next day and that in the hotels the 
manager generally has the public par- 
lors blessed and then sends the priest 
through the building to the rooms of 
[139] 



Italian Vignettes 

all those who are not averse from the 
performance of a similar ceremony. 
We promptly instructed Angelo to ad- 
mit the padre, who was accordingly 
ushered in — a gentle-faced old man in 
a shabby black gown, followed by a 
youthful attendant bearing holy- water. 
The paroco sprinkled a few drops to- 
wards the four corners of the room and 
recited a Latin benediction; then with 
a quick " buon giorno " went on his 
way, leaving us to entertain a quite new 
respect for our apartment as a spot 
whence the sprites of malice and all un- 
charitableness had been at least tempo- 
rarily banished. 

As for Easter Day itself, who shall 
[140] 



Holy Week and Easter in Rome 

describe that? It is not the magnifi- 
cence of the Church ceremonial which 
is so impressive ; it is the attitude of the 
people as a whole. The maid, when 
she brought us our hot water in the 
morning, greeted us with " buona Pas- 
qua," (a good Easter). " Buona Pas- 
qua," smiled the elevator-boy as he took 
us down; "buona Pasqua," obsequi- 
ously murmured the waiter, putting a 
couple of colored eggs before us at 
breakfast — " buona Pasqua, buona 
Pasqua," is the refrain throughout the 
day. And there is nothing formal or 
perfunctory about the salutation; it is 
quite spontaneous and from the heart. 
You have only to go out in the streets 
[141] 



Italian Vignettes 

and watch the crowd that fills them — 
the fathers carrying babies, the mothers 
with half a dozen little ones clinging to 
their skirts, the grandmothers and 
great-grandmothers — to realize that in 
spite of the music and pomp, the sump- 
tuously arrayed Cardinals moving in 
clouds of incense, the red cloth decora- 
tions and fat wax candles painted with 
pictures of lambs and other appropriate 
symbols, morning mass at St. Peter's 
is but a part of the day's charm. It is 
the spirit of joy that seems to permeate 
every nook and cranny and to touch 
every face — no matter how worn or 
aged or sad — with some reflection of 
the glory that is in the golden sunlight 
[ 142 ] 



Holy Week and Easter in Rome 

and the wide blue sky, which brings to 
the traveler the feeling that Easter in 
Rome is indeed " good " in a quite spe- 
cial degree. 



[143] 



VIII 
OLD CLOISTERS 



Old Cloisters 

WHO has not felt the charm that 
clings about old buildings? — a 
charm born less of any tangible beau- 
ties of form and design than of subtle 
things of association and memory that 
seem to emanate from the very stones. 
Wandering through the deserted halls, 
one walks among ghosts that are more 
real than oneself — ghosts of the "dear 
dead women," of the men and the little 
children who wept and laughed here, 
made love and parted, " all in the long 
ago." Nor is this charm anywhere 
more compelling, I think, than in the 
[147] 



Italian Vignettes 

cloisters of some one-time monastery 
whose inhabitants — scattered long since, 
to give place perhaps to the slow 
ravages of decay or perhaps to the blue- 
coated guardians of Government mon- 
uments — ^have yet left behind them, in- 
dehble while the arcades stand, the im- 
press of their personahty. 

In Italy, the intimate appeal of these 
cloisters is the more strongly felt be- 
cause of the cold formality of so many 
of the churches. With what a sense of 
relief one passes, for instance, from the 
magnificent but meaningless interior of 
the Roman San Paolo Fuori le Mura 
— ^with its newness of polished granite 
and its glitter of gilding — into the fra- 
[148] 



Old Cloisters 

grant stillness and sweet antique seren- 
ity of il chiostro alongside! A square 
garden, with close-cropped turf, and 
neat gravelled paths, and a tangled 
loveliness of flowers and shrubs, bor- 
dered by wide cloisters whose arches are 
borne up on the most exquisite of slen- 
der columns, all twisted and carved into 
varying quaintnesses of design — this is 
what remains of the home of the Bene- 
dictine Brothers who once lived in the 
shadow of the church. A wonderful 
life it must have been, one fancies ; rich 
in holy leisure and aspiration. How 
could one look out day after di^j, from 
man's fairest handiwork on God's, 
without striving — even unconsciously 
[14f9] 



Italian Vignettes 

— to bring oneself into harmony with 
the beauty around? The old chroni- 
clers tell scandalous tales enough of the 
wild doings that went on within monas- 
tic walls; but pacing the flagged clois- 
ter, with the scent of roses in one's nos- 
trils and the caress of a steaUng breeze 
on one's cheek, it is easier far, and 
pleasanter, to dwell on some such ac- 
count as that given by Fra Filippo, a 
Siennese who hved in the 14th Century, 
of a certain prior of his acquaintance — 
a man who " although he had most 
great burdens and pain and tribulations 
and suffering, being indeed never free 
from them," yet " never was moved to 
impatience, but rather was always so 
[150] 



Old Cloisters 

placid and kindly and benign and of 
such good cheer, that he seemed verily 
to be burning with holy charity. And 
with every sorrow and every joy of an- 
other, did he grow sad and rejoice as 
though it had been his own. And the 
strangers who stopped at his convent 
were received by him with so much love 
and charity that it seemed they were his 
brothers and sons whom he had for a 
long time been without seeing. And 
never from his mouth did there issue a 
vain or reprehensible word." 

Again in another place, Fra Filippo 

tells of how he came one day, with a 

companion, to the convent of this 

"blessed prior," and found him de- 

[151 ] 



Italian Vignettes 

serted by all his brethren, who had fled 
before the rumor of an approaching 
band of Free Lances. Yet none the 
less, "when he saw us, he received us 
with so much joy as was an admirable 
thing. And in the whole place there 
was nothing left to eat save only two 
rolls, quite small, which he had kept for 
himself, and some wine and some leeks. 
And with a holy charity he obliged us 
to eat with him, and placed those two 
rolls on a table without any cloth, and 
the wine also and the leeks. And God 
knows I speak no lie when I say that 
never have I found myself at any feast 
or wedding or banquet whatsoever, 
when it seemed to me I ate so well and 
[15«] 



Old Cloisters 

so abundantly, and took so great enjoy- 
ment in eating; and likewise did it be- 
fall my companion. For the sweetness 
of the words of God which were in that 
blessed prior's mouth, made a food 
above all the foods of the world." It 
was in the cloister, I am sure, that the 
frugal meal must have been spread, 
where the radiance of the blue sky 
overhead and the golden sunshine all 
aroimd might well make the absence of 
a " cloth " unnoticeable, and give 
breadth and life to the " words of God " 
om the host's lips. 

Almost equally fair a spot, and in- 
deed of close kin in the fashioning of 
its arcades with their low, broad balus- 
[153] 



Italian Vignettes 

trade and dissimilar columns, are the 
Cloisters of St. John Lateran. There 
is perhaps a more tropical note sounded 
in the garden here, where clumps of 
palms spread the wide green of their 
leaves ; and this note is still further em- 
phasized by the curiously carved stone 
well of Saracenic design which occupies 
the center of the court — ^the very well- 
stone, the sacristan will inform you, by 
which Christ met and talked with the 
Woman of Samaria. By what strange 
bypaths of destiny it found its way to 
the cloister of this one-time Benedictine 
Monastery, you are not informed; but 
sitting on its broad edge and gazing 
about you at the fair peacefulness of 
[ 154 ] 



Old Cloisters 

the scene, that other scene, enacted so 
long ago in far-off Palestine, seems to 
come very vividly before the eyes of 
your imagination. Did the monks, you 
wonder, as they paced up and down the 
cloisters, let their eyes rest often on this 
bit of the Holy Land whose tradition 
it would have been sacrilege to ques- 
tion? And did they also call to mind 
the picture of the wandering Christ 
resting there, and the Woman with her 
water- jar standing beside him listening 
to the words which have come down the 
centuries as the most beautiful of all 
interpretations of the relation that 
should exist between God and man? 
" But the hour cometh, and now is, 
[155] 



Italian Vignettes 

when the true worshipper shall worship 
the Father in spirit and in truth: for 
the Father seeketh such to worship him. 
God is a Spirit: and they that worship 
him must worship him in spirit and in 
truth." 

Somewhat later in date than that of 
the Lateran, but full of the same reli- 
gious quietude, is the cloister-sur- 
rounded garden which Michelangelo de- 
signed for the Carthusian Monks who 
seized upon part of the vast ruins of 
Diocletian's Baths and built them a con- 
vent among its walls. Here you look 
through open arches on dark cypress- 
trees, that tradition says were planted 
by the Titan hand which could bring 
[156] 



Old Cloisters 

into being the decorations of the Sistine 
Chapel and yet not disdain to order the 
arrangements of a Carthusian court; 
and carpeting the grass about their 
feet, you see beds of hyacinth and nar- 
cissus, of pansies and violets. In the 
center of the garden is a tiny fountain, 
and put up around it as if in guardian- 
ship are strange mammoth heads of 
bulls and other animals. Broken col- 
umns and grotesque forms gleam here 
and there among the verdure; for these 
cloisters show an intermingling of 
pagan and Christian elements that 
makes them unconsciously typical of 
much which is significant in Italy's 
inner life. Built among the ruins of a 
[157] 



Italian Vignettes 

Roman Emperor's Thermae, they are 
now part of one of Rome's museums; 
and mutilated forms of nymphs and 
goddesses, of youths and maidens, dec- 
orate the arcade designed to be trodden 
by meditative, brown-clad brethren. 
Nor does this juxtaposition bring about 
any sense of discord, but rather a 
deeper, wider harmony of peace. These 
antique fragments, the more pathetic- 
ally lovely for the injuries sustained 
during their long burial, what are they 
but an expression of that same yearn- 
ing after the beautiful and the high 
which later prompted the monastic 
ideal? The goddesses are broken and 
earth-stained, the monks have gone out 
[158] 



Old Cloisters 

forever from the home of their prayers, 
— but the water as it murmurs quietly 
in its basin, and the breeze as it passes 
through the grave cypress-trees, and 
the birds choiring in the branches, all 
maintain that they have had their place 
and value in the eternal scheme of 
things. Amidst such a scene, under 
such a wide sky of luminous turquoise, 
belief must meet with eagerness the 
poet's conviction that 

** All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of 
good shall exist; 
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty nor 

good, nor power 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each sur- 
vives for the melodist 
When eternity affirms the conception of an 
hour." 

[159] 



IX 

TIVOLI 



TlVOLI 

A DAY at Tivoli is a symphonic 
-^^^^ poem in three parts, with the trip 
thither for a kind of prelude. Through 
the heat-stricken, haunting melancholy 
of the Roman Campagna, with its bur- 
den of suggestion in every note, from 
the gravely valiant march of the aque- 
ducts to the broken undulations of soil 
that might pass for the physical expres- 
sion of a buried life still obscurely but 
turbulently stirring, you draw near and 
are borne up into the cool fastnesses of 
those Sabine Mountains which have 
[163] 



Italian Vignettes 

been at once the witnesses and the pro- 
longation of the mighty legend of 
Rome. Here you find that Tivoli 
which was the Tibur of the ancients; 
and here — crowning a rocky spur, the 
time-stained marble of its columns 
blending into the color and sentiment 
of its surroundings with that intimate 
air of relationship which makes one of 
the subtlest charms of Italian ruins — 
stands the little circular temple ascribed 
by tradition to the worship of Tibur's 
Sibyl. Rounded fold on rounded fold, 
the mountains lie about it. Below is a 
deep gorge tapestried in varied greens 
of live-oak and ilex and laurel, a haunt 
meet, one fancies, for shy fauns hiding 
[ 164 ] 



Tivoli 

in lush dells, where hstening one might 
even hear the pipings of Pan himself as 
an accompaniment to the distance- 
softened roar of the great Fall that 
comes down opposite in foam-white 
turbulence. Nor is this the only water- 
note. Far away to the right, silver 
veinings over the rockface tell of the 
smaller cascades that are bringing their 
song, too, down to the River Anio, their 
song of the high mountain solitudes 
and the pure source where they had 
their birth. 

It must be a world-deadened spirit 
indeed that can find no answering thrill 
wherewith to meet the appeal of such a 
scene. 

[165] 



Italian Vignettes 

*' Great God! I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea. 
Have glimpses that would make me less for- 
lorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

As you stand by the Temple of the 
Sibyl at Tivoli, such glimpses do come; 
your eyes grow keen to see, not Proteus 
indeed, but the vanishing form of 
Daphne, and your ea;rs are quickened, 
not to the blowing of Triton's horn, but 
to the song of the Nymph in the Falls. 
You realize, perhaps, as never before, 
the divine and eternal element in the old 
nature worship; the significance for us 
to-day, in this our complex modern life, 
[166] 



Tivoli 

of the truth towards which the ancients 
were reaching when they put this tem- 
ple here, this home for the Sibyl who 
in our present thought becomes simply 
as it were the concentrated voice of Na- 
ture, a medium of expression for the 
wisdom of those hoar senators the 
mountains, of the limitless light of the 
sky, of the whispering trees. And with 
what a glad further rise of the spirit 
towards the same truth, comes the re- 
membrance that it was from the lips of 
these same Sibyls, who " were old when 
the world was new," that there issued a 
prophecy of the coming Christ! 

It is by winding ways, narrow, dark, 
and of ill-odor, that you pass out of the 
[167] 



Italian Vignettes 

old Roman into the mediaeval world, 
and thence to the portal of the Villa 
d'Este and the Renaissance. The 
transition is rapid and striking. Virgil 
gives place to Boccaccio, and you find 
yourself in a dwelling akin to that 
palace of the "Decamerone" with its 
"spacious and fair court in the midst, 
and with loggias and with halls and 
with rooms, each one in its own fashion 
most beautiful, and made with joyous 
paintings praiseworthy and ornate; and 
with all about it fields, and gardens 
wonderful to see, and with wells of 
freshest water." 

Especially is it in these " gardens 
wonderful to see," that you realize the 
[168] 



Tivoli 

contrast between the scene you have 
just left and that upon which you have 
entered. Before you, flights of stone 
steps go down to a pleached alley, that 
stretches into limitless distance under 
a shadow of bordering cypress-trees. 
The water — the very sound of which 
here comes as diff^erently to your ear as 
do the notes of a flute from those of a 
violoncello — either sleeps in moss- 
stained marble basins played over by 
darting dragon-flies, or if it falls in 
cascades, does so over cunningly de- 
vised "effects" of rock, and is blown 
from Triton-shells into fern- fringed 
reservoirs. Quaintly clipped hedges 
point the way to formal bowers, and 
[169] 



Italian Vignettes 

white forms gleam here and there in the 
green dusk — pathetically appealing 
forms of broken goddesses and time- 
scarred gods. It is a very Garden of 
Eden — but a Garden of Eden of the 
Renaissance. Never could it havp 
come into being in the days before Eve 
tasted of the apple. Nature, of which 
by the Temple of the Sibyl you realized 
the elemental significance, has here be- 
come thoroughly sophisticated, thor- 
oughly imbued with a self -conscious- 
ness that is as charming as the sponta- 
neous coquetry of a pretty woman. You 
need not hope in straying along these 
exquisite alleys ever to surprise a f risk- 
[ no ] 



Tivoli 

ing faun ; no dryads will peep out at you 
from behind these oak-trees. Instead 
you instinctively look for figures such as 
throng the frescoes of Ghirlandajo and 
Orcagna and their fellows — figures of 
stately ladies with the ghnt of sunlight 
in their hair and in the rich brocade of 
their gowns, and with perhaps a single 
jewel burning on the whiteness of their 
low, broad foreheads ; of handsome men 
clad, they too, in silks and furs, able to 
tread a measure or murmur over one of 
Messer Petrarca's sonnets. Peacocks 
belong here, too; and the little white 
dogs beloved of so many of the old 
painters; and stone tables laden with 
[171] 



Italian Vignettes 

" A heap 
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd 
With jellies soother than the creamy curd. 
And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon; 
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred 
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one. 
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon." 

Through the tinkle of the water you 
hear soft laughter, with just a note of 
mockery in it, and the musical blending 
of voices ; and the breeze as it steals past 
you seems to bear a faint, haunting, ex- 
quisite perfume of those vanished days 
and people. The more you linger 
among the shaded paths and by the 
voiceful fountains, the stronger be- 
comes the hold upon your fancy of 
their charm, and the keener your under- 
[17^] 



Tivoli 

standing that an essential part of that 
charm is in its suggestion of a rich hu- 
manity underlying all the formalism, 
of a heart beating in the old sundial as 
it marks off the centuries. 

It is at Hadrian's Villa, some three 
miles away, that you find the third part 
in the symphonic poem. The road, a 
dusty riband between bordering green, 
winds among the hills, past groves of 
gnarled, fantastic olive-trees that your 
driver, answering a question as to their 
age, will tell you have been there " since 
before the deluge, Signorina." If it 
be a spring day, and the sun is beating 
hotly down on a teeming earth from out 
the luminous blue, you are inclined 
[173] 



Italian Vignettes 

gratefully to welcome the moment 
when you descend from the carriage 
and pass into the walk, kept cool and 
shadowy by its double line of stately cy- 
press-trees, that leads to the scattered 
ruins of the Villa itself. Here they 
are — the long brick wall, the fragments 
of columns, the denuded arches, crum- 
bling relics of the glory that was Rome's. 
This, your guide will tell you, was the 
Biblioteca; this the Triclinium; here a 
garden was laid out; there the Basilica 
upreared its marble pillars. You try 
to conceive of the whole vast pile as it 
must have appeared when Hadrian the 
Emperor took his ease in its brilliant 
chambers, putting aside the cares of 
[174] 



Tivoli 

state to converse with sages in the Sala 
dei Filosofi; but your mind shrinks, 
somehow, from the reconstruction. 
Tacitly it seems to recognize that the 
inner beauty, the true appeal of the 
place, is not archaeological — not even, 
in a certain sense, historical. Standing 
in all its superb freshness and finish, it 
could not have had the significance in- 
nate now in the play of the warm lights 
and velvet shadows over its desolation; 
in the fragrance of the new-blown roses 
rooted amidst its hoary age ; in the song 
of the birds nesting in its statue-emp- 
tied niches. For it has become the final 
chord of the great poem of nature. In 
the Temple of the Sibyl, there sounds a 
[175] 



Italian Vignettes 

reminder from the days when the world 
was very new, when men's ears were 
more keen than now to catch God's ut- 
terance in the sweep of the wind 
through the trees, in the fall of the 
water over the rocks ; the gardens of the 
Villa d'Este speak of nature moulded 
by man, and taking with gracious re- 
ceptiveness the imprint of his personal- 
ity; but in Villa Adriana, you have 
about man's dying work, nature's un- 
dying arms, harmonizing all that was 
discordant, mellowing all that was 
harsh and crude, turning ruin into 
beauty, proclaiming eternity. 



[n6] 



X 



STONES OF FLORENCE 



Stones of Florence 

IT has often seemed to me that there 
is no city in Italy which has not as it 
were an individual motif, that detaches 
itself against the symphonic back- 
gromid of the general charm. In 
Rome, it is pre-eminently an exquisite 
and soul-stirring minor cadence telling 
of the beauty in ruin; in Venice it is a 
dreamful strain of moonlight and mur- 
muring water; while in Florence, 
surely, — that "most famous and most 
beautiful daughter of Rome " — the dis- 
tinctive note is struck in the rich poetry 
of her mediseval buildings — buildings 
[179] 



Italian Vignettes 

that perpetuate and interpret the forces 
of which they were the outgrowth. To 
walk over the Ponte Vecchio — the nar- 
row Ponte Vecchio, with its tiny shops 
clinging barnacle-wise on either side — 
is to find oneself in the Sixteenth Cen- 
tury with Benvenuto Cellini, whose 
bust fitly presides over this haunt of 
goldsmiths. To stand in the dim Bap- 
tistery is to draw near with quickened 
sympathy to the mighty shade of 
Dante, who was never more humanly 
appealing than in the pathos of his ref- 
erences to " il mio bel San Giovanni " — 
symbol to him of Florence and happier 
days. Above all, to visit the Bar- 
gello — ancient palace of the Executor 
[180] 




The square^ battlemented^ and towered stone pile 



Stones of Florence 

of Justice — and the Convent of San 
Marco — shrine of Fra Angelico's ge- 
nius, — ^is to penetrate deep into the chiv- 
alric and the monastic spirit of the 
Middle Ages. 

They are narrow and labyrinthine 
ways the visitor must follow to come at 
the first of these monuments — the 
square, battlemented and towered stone 
pile which was once the residence of the 
Podesta, later that of the Executor of 
Justice ; and which the modern rage for 
utility has fortunately spared, leaving 
the noble old rooms to the undisturbed 
possession of stirring memories and 
treasures of art. A sense of untouched 
medigevalism invades you at first en- 
[181] 



Italian Vignettes 

trance. In the vast and vaulted stone 
hall, where all sounds echo hollowly 
among the massive pillars, and suits of 
armoir and strange weapons loom 
grimly in the shadows, the page of his-^ 
tory seems to roll back till you stand in 
the torture-chamber of five centuries 
ago, amidst the victims of that Fulcieri. 
da' Calboh who, as Podesta, 

" Many of life deprived, himself of fame/* 

The clang of the gate, opening to ad" 
mit other visitors, makes you start with 
an apprehension of dragging chains; 
and in the ear of your fantasy are the 
whisperings of many voices — threats in 
some, in others horror, or defiance, or- 
[18^] 



Stones of Florence 

despair. It is almost with a breath of 
relief and escape that you push open the 
low door which leads into the court — 
the dazzhng open court, with its clois- 
ter, round-arched and vaulted, running 
around three sides; its wealth of rich 
coloring ; its myriad beauties of line and 
decoration. In the arcade and in cer- 
tain small rooms which open from it, 
are sheltered various pieces of stat- 
uary, Michelangelo's "Victory" among 
them; but it is not on these forms of 
cold marble that you find your eyes 
dwelling. Instead you cross the broad 
flagged space and ensconce yourself in 
the arcade on the left, near the entrance 
wall with its plaques of heraldic carv- 
[183] 



Italian Vignettes 

ings and inscriptions. Before you is 
the beautiful carved staircase, with its 
guardian lion, leading to the open log- 
gia of the second floor; higher still in 
the stone wall are Gothic windows, 
through whose ruby and purple panes 
the light falls in soft, amethystine rich- 
ness. 'No matter with how gray a tap- 
estry of clouds the sky above the great 
pile be hung, there seems no lack of 
color, ever, in this wondrous court. 
Wlarm and beautiful and dignified 
and rich, it would need for its right 
description the word-painting of a 
Tennyson; and for its creation it 
needed the mailed hands of a race long 
since passed away — a race who were 
[184] 




The beautiful carved staircase^ with its 
guardian lion . . . 



Stones of Florence 

lawless and bloody and cruel, barba- 
rians according to every standard of 
our civilization, yet who cherished in 
their strong breasts a flower of chivalric 
poetry for which we should perhaps to- 
day have far to seek. 

Passing upstairs, you will find that 
the charm laid upon you by the court 
remains undispelled. From the loggia 
with its bronze bells — those tongues of 
ancient Florence that still tell even in 
their silence of sorrow and of gladness, 
of alarms and of festivals, — you pass 
on the right into a spacious, knightly 
hall, peopled now by the works of 
Donatello, originals and casts. Here 
is the splendid old " Marzocco," the 
[185] 



Italian Vignettes 

stone lion who once stood guard over 
the Palazzo Vecehio; and the slender, 
rigid St. George, his shield in front of 
him, and every straight, clear-cut hne 
full of strength and a stern simplicity. 
They harmonize, both of them, with 
their surroundings. The Marzocco's 
rugged form speaks eloquently of the 
drama of the Commune as it played it- 
self out before him, there in the Piazza 
della Signoria, the heart of the city; 
while the St. George seems to embody 
the very spirit of a nobly militant 
knighthood. 

" Spirits of (/Id that bore me, 
And set me, meek of mind, 
Between great dreams before me, 
And deeds as great behind, 
[186] 



Stones of Florence 

Knowing humanity my star 

As first abroad I ride, 

Shall help me wear, with every scar, 

Honor at eventide. 

** Let claws of lightning clutch me 
From summer's groaning cloud, 
Or ever malice touch me. 
And glory make me proud. 
O give my youth, my faith, my sword 
Choice of the heart's desire: 
A short life in the saddle, Lord ! 
Not long life by the fire. 

** I fear no breathing bowman, 
But only, east and west, 
The awful other foeman 
Impowered in my breast. 
The outer fray in the sun shall be, 
The inner beneath the moon; 
And may Our Lady grant to me 
Sight of the Dragon soon ! " * 

* Louise Imogen Guiney: "The Knight Er- 
rant: Donatello's St. George." 
[187] 



Italian Vignettes 

It was in this hall that the members 
of the General Council of the Com- 
mune were wont to hold their meetings. 
Beyond is the stately room, blazoned 
with heraldic devices, which was the 
audience chamber of the Podesta, and 
opening from the latter, the same offi- 
cial's private chapel — a juxtaposition 
which seems somehow suggestive of the 
intimate relation maintained in those 
days between Church and State. 
Magnificently illuminated manuscripts, 
their pages heavy with gold and a-glow 
with color, are collected in the ante- 
room; and high up on the rear wall of 
the chapel proper, amidst the defaced 
remains of the frescoes that once cov- 
[188] 



Stones of Florence 

ered it like a tapestry, there stands out 
the pure profile under the scholar's red 
cap which the world has come to accept 
as the typical representation of Dante. 
Modern criticism — that iconoclast — re- 
fuses to countenance the pleasant tra- 
dition that makes Giotto the painter of 
the portrait, and indeed will not admit 
of its being even a contemporaneous 
one ; nevertheless, for the student of the 
" Divinia Commedia," this broad, high 
brow and these thin lips, tight shut as 
if in bitter secret scorn, will always 
possess a deep imaginative truthful- 
ness. 

On the same floor with the chapel are 
several other rooms, containing bronzes 
[189] 



Italian Vignettes 

of more or less interest — Giovanni da 
Bologna's graceful Mercury among 
them, and the designs offered by Ghi- 
berti and Brunnelleschi in the competi- 
tion for the Baptistery doors. Then if 
you will climb a little higher by a nar- 
row staircase, you may enjoy a very 
feast of the delicate enameled terra- 
cotta work of the Delia Robbias. Ten- 
derly charming indeed are these tondos 
and plaques, with their gentle Madon- 
nas and plump Babies, their clear color- 
ing of blue and white and green, their 
exquisite encircling garlands of inter- 
spersed flowers and fruits. But none 
the less, as you take your way down- 
stairs once more, through the nobly 
[ 190 ] 



Stones of Florence 

proportioned halls, across the court into 
the grim Hall of Armor, and so back to 
the street and the Twentieth Century, 
you find yourself accompanied less by 
the recollection of any specific thing 
seen, than by an impression of a whole 
of harmony and significance which, un- 
touched by any modern or discordant 
note, captures the imagination and 
sinks richly into the memory. 

It w^as the very morning after our 
visit to the Bargello, I remember, that 
we took our way over to the Piazza San 
Marco, with its Church and Convent of 
the same name — historic ground for the 
student of Florentine story, and sacred 
for him to whom Fra Angelico is dear 
[191] 



Italian Vignettes 

and Savonarola a venerated martyr. 
The little church has been much re- 
stored, and is gloomy and chill within; 
yet it is not hard for the imagination to 
call up some of the stirring scenes once 
enacted there — that memorable even- 
ing, for instance, when the mob that had 
gone out the day before to see Savona- 
rola's doctrines tried in the Ordeal by 
Fire (and gone in vain), attacked the 
building during service-time, shrieking 
out imprecations on the Ftate for their 
disappointment; while behind barred 
doors the friars made valiant resistance, 
even resorting to the use of fire-arms, 
till they were quelled by the authority 
of Savonarola himself. 
[ 192 ] 



Stones of Florence 

Passing from the church into the 
convent alongside, you enter a very dif- 
ferent atmosphere. Here are no 
memories of turmoil and bloodshed, 
but only a great peace and quietude 
brooding over the two cloistered courts 
with their grass and flowers, over the 
dim halls and the tiny empty cells. 
Fra Angelico, guardian spirit of the 
place, has left his seal upon the very 
first of these courts in the lunettes that 
crown its five doorways. Over the en- 
trance of the Guest Chamber is the 
most beautiful of all — Christ as a pil- 
grim being received by two Domini- 
cans. The sad yet benignantly lovely 
face of the Son, and the eager, welcom- 
[ 193 ] 



Italian Vignettes 

ing hospitality in the attitudes and ex- 
pressions of the monks, give the little 
composition a charm of tenderest ap- 
peal. 

Off this court opens also the great 
Refectory of the convent — ^bare and 
deserted now, save for the sort of pul- 
pit where the reader used to stand dur- 
ing meals, and the frame in which was 
enshrined Angelico's large tabernacle 
picture. On the end wall is a fresco by 
Sogliani, representing St. Dominic and 
his monks at table, being fed by angels 
— a composition full of life and actual- 
ity, the diverse expressions displayed by 
the good brothers being particularly 
well rendered. Especially charming is 
[194] 



Stones of Florence 

the young Frate on the right, whose 
youthful eagerness is being so gently 
but firmly rebuked by one of his elders. 
A little farther around the court is 
the entrance to the Chapter House 
which, in "Romola," George Eliot 
makes the background of Dino's death 
scene. Here is the great frescoed 
Crucifixion that is surely one of Fra 
Angehco's grandest, as it is one of his 
largest compositions. In the center 
hangs the agonizing Christ; below, at 
the foot of the Cross, kneels the white- 
haired St. Dominic, vn\h such sorrow 
in his face; wliile at one side is gath- 
ered the crowd of spectators — depicted, 
these latter, with a power of characteri- 
[195] 



Italian Vignettes 

zation, of individualization, which one 
is little apt to attribute to the gentle 
Frate, but which appears again in the 
row of seventeen miniature heads run- 
ning along the base of the fresco and 
representing various celebrated mem- 
bers of the Dominican Order. 

A narrow passage leads from the 
first into the second and larger court, 
with its lovely garden and noble trees. 
Here it is well to rest awhile, looking 
up at the yellow walls of the convent 
that shut the world away, listening to 
the high treble of the birds and the oc- 
casional deeper note of a bell sounding 
purely across the distance, and letting 
the sweet remote peace of it all sink 
[196] 



Stones of Florence 

comfortingly into your heart. Then, 
when you climb the narrow stairway 
that gives the world entrance into the 
heritage left it by the Beato AngeUco, 
you will be prepared to appreciate to 
the full the greeting of that tender 
"Annunciation," in the presence of 
which surely no brother could have 
needed the reminder of its inscription: 
" When thou shalt have come before the 
image of the spotless Virgin, beware 
that by negligence the Ave be not 
silent." 

From the landing-place before the 

" Annunciation," corridors branch off 

to right and left, bordered on either side 

with the quarters of the monks. Ah, 

[197] 



Italian Vignettes 

those cells ! — narrow and dim, yet lumi- 
nous with the pale frescoes that make 
each one a shrine. Here a Transfigu- 
ration, a Nativity, a Madonna and 
Child; there a white, ethereal Corona- 
tion; everywhere the figure of St. 
Dominic, gravely beautiful, now por- 
ing over a book, now sorrowing at the 
foot of the Cross, now standing tri- 
umphant among other famous members 
of his Order. Here it is that we see the 
apotheosis of the Blessed Brother's 
genius; here, on these rough walls a 
charm that shrinks timidly away in the 
crowded atmosphere of galleries an^^ 
the company of Venuses and those opu- 
lent Madonnas who are little better, 
1 198 ] 
















-5: 



k. 






Stones of Florence 

blossoms delicately and perfectly in 
spiritual loveliness. 

A goodly place, too, is the magnifi- 
cent Library, redolent still of scholarly 
dignity, although the shelves that line 
the walls are empty of the great vol- 
umes once their pride. Instead, spoils 
of precious illuminated manuscripts 
have been brought from many a dis- 
solved convent to lie open on broad 
tables and rejoice the eyes of students 
of to-day; and among these are several 
which a pleasant tradition ascribes to 
the patient art of the Beato Angelico's 
own brother — a monk likewise, Fra 
Benedetto da Mugello. 

In this hall, however, it is another 
[ 199 ] 



Italian Vignettes 

spirit which is predominant — a spirit of 
the Church Militant. Here Gerolamo 
Savonarola spoke for the last time to 
the assembled brethren of his convent, 
on Palm Sunday, 1498; and from here 
he went out to imprisonment and death ; 
while just a little beyond, at the end of 
the passage, are the three small rooms 
— opening one into the other — ^where 
he studied and planned and dreamed in 
the days when he was Prior of San 
Marco. They are full of relics, these 
cells — ^books annotated in his own hand, 
a rosary, a crucifix — ^while reigning 
over them all is the Frate himself, his 
harsh, strong profile standing out from 
the blackness of Bartolommeo's can- 
[ 200 ] 







-3 

o 

Co 



Stones of Florence 

vas as it must have stood out against 
the austere background of the monastic 
walls as he sat here of old, perhaps 
writing the fatal letters calling upon 
the powers of Europe to depose the 
Pope and reform the Church — those 
letters that made sure his already 
planned doom. 

"I will return without fail to com- 
fort you, dead or aHve," he is reported 
to have said to his monks when he was 
bidding them good-bye; and in a sense 
the prophecy is fulfilled. His spirit 
does indeed haunt San Marco, but 
purged of its restlessness, its inconsist- 
encies, full of the same holy peace which 
that other earlier spirit of the painter- 
[£01] 



Italian Vignettes 

monk has left behind him "to the glory 
of God." The quintessence of all that 
was most ideally true and fine in the 
ecclesiastical life of the Middle Ages 
— ^that is what San Marco is signifi- 
cant of to-day; as the Bargello is sig- 
nificant of all that was most ideally high 
and beautiful in the worldly life of the 
same period. And in the remembrance 
of those who have known and loved 
them, they mingle and blend, this 
church chaunt and knightly poem, rich 
melodies from a past 

" Never to be again." 



[20S] 



XI 



VENETIAN MONAS 
TERY 



A Venetian IMonastery 

QIGNORINA, un piccolo giro a 
^^ San Lazzaro prima di tornare?"* 

We were putting off from the land- 
ing-place at the Lido as our gondolier 
murmured the question, and I nodded 
in answer with that blissful acquies- 
cence in the course of events which is 
apt to take soft possession of the so- 
journer in Venice. None of us had 
ever heard of San Lazzaro before. It 
might be an island, or it might be a 
church ; it might be within a distance of 

* A little turn to San Lazzaro before going 
back? 

[205] 



Italian Vignettes 

a few yards, or it might be halfway to 
Chioggia. What matter? So long as 
we continued to drift dreamfully over 
an opalescent lagoon that melted by im- 
perceptible gradations into an equally 
opalescent sky, the direction we fol- 
lowed was a thing of small moment. 
Angelo, however, was not minded to let 
us forget in such lotos-eating our mani- 
fest duties as sightseers; and presently 
when his vigorous strokes had brought 
us through many a cross-current to a 
little spot of verdure which revealed it- 
self on closer inspection as an island, he 
gave a quick turn to his oar and shot 
the gondola into a tiny slip beside a 
flight of worn stone steps. 
[ 206 ] 



A Venetian Monastery 

"Ecco, San Lazzaro, signorina," he 
remarked, holding out his hand with the 
evident expectation of assisting us to 
alight. 

The prospect was sufficiently entic- 
ing. Trees hung their green plum- 
age over our heads, and the song of 
birds floated in the still air. Neverthe- 
less, he who has once yielded himself to 
the charm of the gondola, is not to be 
won from among its cushions without 
difficulty, and I made no motion to rise 
as I instituted further inquiries. 

"What is San Lazzaro, Angelo? 
What is there to see? " 

" But much, much, signorina," urged 
the gondolier. "It is the Convent of 
[207] 



Italian Vignettes 

the Armenian Brothers, very learned 
men, and rich also. One of the frati 
will tell the signorina all, and show the 
garden and the convento/^ 

Evidently Angelo was not to be 
gainsaid. We disembarked, and in a 
few moments found ourselves under the 
guidance of a black-habited monk, 
whose dark, square-trimmed beard and 
grave, strong features bore an unmis- 
takably Eastern stamp. He led us 
first into the cloister — a spot that has 
blossomed into fragrant beauty under 
the loving tendence of one of the 
brothers, who, we were told, takes an 
especial delight in all growing things. 
Roses twine themselves about the col- 
[^08] 




-i«a. ^i^' 



A Venetian Monastery 

umned arcades, touching the rough 
stone with delicate bloom; more roses 
shower their petals from many a bush; 
while pansies and carnations, and a hun- 
dred like simple flowers, make waves of 
color in narrow beds or flame in earth- 
enware pots. It is a spot to make one 
in love with solitude and meditation. 
Even Byron's uneasy spirit, one fan- 
cies, must have been soothed by its quiet 
charm during those months he spent 
here, when he was studying Greek in 
preparation for the expedition from 
which he was never to return. It is 
pleasant to think of such an interlude 
in so stormy a life ; pleasant to imagine 
the poet wandering through the silent 
[209] 



Italian Vignettes 

garden, and forgetting for a while dis- 
appointed hopes, restless ambitions, 
and the tumult of feeling and passion, 
in the ordered monotony of the eon- 
vent's daily routine. We went up- 
stairs, later, to the little room he occu- 
pied, and saw the desk at which he 
wrote and worked. The Visitor's Book 
is kept there now — full of names of the 
many travelers, famous and undistin- 
guished alike, who yearly come to the 
island to hear the monks' tales of " il 
poeta inglese." 

San Lazzaro, however, has much of 
interest besides its Byronic associations. 
Its brothers are all scholars, deeply 
versed in Oriental lore, and laboring in- 

[aio] 



A Venetian Monastery 

defatigably to spread among their fel- 
low-countrymen of Armenia the knowl- 
edge and precepts of Christianity. In 
the long library, the light falls mellowly 
on many a time-stained volume; while 
downstairs one room is filled with the 
most modern of printing-presses, 
whence issue translations of the Bible 
and various religious and educational 
works in numerous Eastern dialects. 
Our guide remarked that all the finest 
of their presses bore the names of 
American makers, and showed us speci- 
mens of the work they turned out. 
One little book was printed in thirty-six 
different languages, including He- 
brew, Sanskrit, and Greek. 
[ ^11 ] 



Italian Vignettes 

From the workrooms we passed into 
the Refectory, where a long table was 
spread for the evening meal. The 
coarse cloth that covered it was exquis- 
itely clean ; glass caraff es of red wine 
and slim brown loaves of bread were 
placed at intervals down the center ; and 
the rays of the decKning sun, creeping 
through the windows, flecked the walls 
of the room with golden light. Every- 
thing seemed to bespeak an order, a 
quiet, a content, that one felt to be en- 
viable. I remarked as much to our 
guide, adding that I thought I should 
like to come there to hve. He shook his 
head with a slow smile. 

"Mademoiselle would soon grow 
tired," he said. 

[ 212 ] 



A Venetian Monastery 

Mademoiselle would soon grow tired 
. . . Would she? I wondered, as 
we followed the monk out through the 
garden again to a point commanding a 
wider view over the lagoon. The water 
lay outstretched under the luminous 
sky, an expanse of liquid mother-of- 
pearl. Here and there a dash of em- 
erald or a gleam of warm-colored walls 
indicated an island; and away in front 
of us a line of brown piles, like gaunt 
sentinels, pointed the channel to that 
distant mirage of domes and towers 
that was Venice. The air was full of a 
drowsy fragrance; the trees and bushes 
of the little garden whispered softly to 
each other of the secrets told them by 
the birds. Surely there ought to be a 
[213] 



Italian Vignettes 

charm to defy weariness in any such re- 
moteness from the world's dust and din. 
To rise in the mornings at the mellow 
summons of the chapel bell; to pore 
over the garnered wisdom of the ages in 
the hbrary, feeling oneself not an in- 
heritor merely, but an active agent of 
transmission; to dream in the garden 
when working hours were over, brought 
nearer to the great heart of things by 
a thousand subtle allurements of nature ; 
to watch sunrises and sunsets succeed 
each other, and learn not to worry over- 
much about " to-morrow " but to savor 
to the utmost the joy and to meet stead- 
fastly the sorrow of "to-day," — would 
not such a life hold possibilities of rich- 
[ 814 ] 



A Venetian Monastery 

ness far exceeding any known to the 
average existence, lived in the turmoil of 
a constant strife after place and power? 
At any rate, it is, I am sure, good for us 
to feel that some such lives are being 
lived somewhere, even in this Twentieth 
Century; and as we watched San Laz;- 
zaro fading into the surdit distance, I 
seemed still to see the black figure of 
our monkish guide standing amidst the 
garden green, a symbol of the large 
simplicity and graciousness that we so 
often miss in the hurry of our busy 
way. 



[215] 



:T'25 1S05 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



020 1 



5 668 3 



••'">^^t#i^ 




'^m-^j 






'Mi^ 












■BR- ■^,^a * -iv/^ •.•.■■t"*-4^/ 



